“So you think Temekian did this?”
“I recognized one of his AP thugs.”
“How do you know they were Armenian?”
I shot him a look.
“Did you tell anyone where I was living?” I asked.
When I originally shared my contact information with Rafi, my current address came over with the phone number in the text. He was one of the few people who had it.
“Either inadvertently or not,” I added.
Rafi registered the implication in the last statement, and he didn’t like it.
“I haven’t seen him in weeks,” he answered tersely, “and I never gave no one your stupid address.”
I let the din of the coffee shop fill the silence between us.
“Do you think they killed my father?” he asked, his face emotionless and unreadable.
Throughout all the running around and the events that kicked off when Ed disappeared, I’d lost track of the basic tragedy in the situation: that there was a boy still struggling to figure out what happened to his father.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“That company that you and my dad work for, they do any kind of lawyer work?” he asked. I was amazed at how little he knew about his father and his line of work, though I had heard similar things with friends who were parents—your kids care about you up until around age eleven; then they stop and don’t pick it back up until their mid-twenties.
“Well, we have lawyers on staff, but we aren’t a law firm. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing, was just curious.”
“It has to be something important or you wouldn’t have asked. Do you need legal help?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Did you get into trouble with the police?”
“Just because I’m Armenian doesn’t mean I’m a gangster.”
“Stop playing the martyr. You know that’s not what I meant.”
He waited a while before continuing. “I think my grandfather is taking my dad’s money.”
“How do you know this?”
“He’s writing checks using my father’s money,” Rafi explained. He sounded contrite despite the fact that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
“Does your grandfather have authority to draw off your father’s accounts?”
“I don’t think so. He met with some guy the other day at my uncle’s house. I listened in from the kitchen. They were talking about that one building, the one down in Lincoln Heights.”
“The Deakins?”
“Yeah. They were trying to figure out a way to sell it without my dad’s approval. This guy sounded like some kind of expert. He said there were ways around it, that my dad didn’t actually have to sign over the documents.”
“Can you describe this man?” I asked.
Rafi gave me a description that fit the man I had spoken to from GVK Properties, the man whose name I could never remember.
“I am going to talk to your grandfather.”
“Please don’t say anything. This is a family thing,” he said. I knew he meant something among Armenians that needed to be settled among Armenians.
“Well, I know some lawyers, but none of them are Armenian.”
“That’s okay. For that I want a white guy,” he said, laughing. “Will this lawyer need money? I mean, how much will it cost?”
“Pro bono,” I lied. “They’ll work for free as a favor to me.”
If I had told him that I would pay for their services, he would never have contacted them. He had a lot of pride for such a young man. We chatted a bit more, commenting on all the fancy cars parked in the lot and the fact that no one seemed to have a job that required they spend the better part of the afternoon in an office.
“This is their office,” he explained.
As I got up to leave, Rafi called out to me.
“Hey. I never told him where you lived.”
“I know you didn’t, Rafi.”
“If it means anything,” he said, “Temekian usually hangs out at the bakery on the corner of Geneva and Harvard. Though I wouldn’t go strolling in there unless you want your face pushed in again.”
I didn’t have to worry about that. By the time I arrived at the bakery the entire block had been cordoned off by the Glendale PD. All attention was on a nondescript storefront where the gaggle of police officers parted ways to let Cheli lead a handcuffed Ardavan Temekian to a waiting cruiser.
WHAT’S IN A ZONE?
It’s a prescription drug scam. Temekian’s crew picks up homeless guys, usually vets, and drives them around to a handful of shady Armenian doctors in East Hollywood who write out prescriptions, usually for oxycodone. In one day the guy can collect up to ten prescriptions. Temekian pays off his runner and sells the pills on the street for around twenty bucks a pop.”
We sat in my living room and ate noodles that Cheli had grabbed in Chinatown on the way to my apartment. She tried to play it cool, but her excitement came through the pitch of her voice.
“I’ve been on this one for seven months. We picked up one of the doctors on a statutory rape charge and got him to turn on Temekian. The man was pissed off when I told him how much those pills sold for. I guess he wasn’t getting paid that much.”
She sort of smiled to herself, the same look she had when I saw her leading Temekian to the police cruiser. While her male counterparts watched her with a mixture of admiration and envy, I felt only the first part.
“What?” she asked, suddenly shy under my gaze.
“I’m happy for you,” I said.
She laughed nervously and waved it off, shifting the attention away from her.
“So, what’d you guys find out?”
I filled her in on what Mike and I had pieced together from Claire’s emails on the Arroyo. There were also the bits I’d learned from Rafi and the current attempts to sell the Deakins Building. And finally, there was what little we’d learned about the mysterious figure Salas who was behind the purchase of several buildings on Holcomb. I hoped for a similar reaction to the one I had a moment ago, but Cheli simply listened and grew more sullen the more I spoke.
“Everything okay?” I finally asked.
That seemed to bring her out of her daze.
“Chuck, I’m sorry I’ve been sort of disconnected for a while.”
Truth was I hadn’t heard a word from her since the night I got beat up in my apartment, despite several attempts to reach her. I was hesitant to admit it, both to Cheli and to myself, just how disappointing that was. What began as an attraction more toward the job that came with the woman was quickly becoming an attraction to the woman herself. And I wasn’t sure I was ready for it.
“Sounds like you’ve been busy,” I said, giving us both an easy out.
She didn’t take it.
“It has nothing to do with work. I’ve been distant for a reason.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a weird time for me. I haven’t really been with anyone since my husband passed. Maybe I’m a little afraid, a little guarded, a little…I don’t know what.”
“That’s understandable.”
“But not fair,” she said. “It’s not fair to you. I have a bunch going on in my head. Maybe just go easy on me, okay?”
“I don’t even know what that means,” I said.
“Me either.”
I took her hand and we sat in an awkward, anticipatory silence.
“Where’s your neighbor and the music?”
“It must be his night off.”
We kissed in the quiet and slowly got comfortable with each other and put away whatever thoughts of failed marriages and past loves still lingered. Cheli spent the night and even part of the morning. Maybe it was the awkwardness of the evening or even the Spartan setting with the mattress on the floor, but the whole thing felt like a college romance betweeen adults.
“I got jobs to run,” Rosie said as I approached. She had her boots propped up on the coffee table in our
reception area, much to the annoyance of the woman manning the front desk. She also kept her call radio at a volume set for traffic noise and not the hushed tones of my office.
“Here’s your package,” she said, but as I grabbed the padded envelope, she held tightly onto her end. With raised eyebrows she asked, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
I looked around nervously. The receptionist wasn’t watching us, but I could tell she had her ear trained in our direction.
“Will you take a check?” I asked.
Rosie’s blank stare was my answer to that.
We went downstairs to the building lobby so I could get money out of the ATM. Rosie pocketed the cash and handed me the package. It was heavy.
“Give me a minute to run up and make a copy,” I said.
“I already did,” Rosie answered. “One for you and one for me in case any of this comes back to bite me in the ass.”
Rosie collected her bike, which she had left leaning against the security desk. The guard looked up from his monitors. “You know, Miss,” he said, “you can’t have your bike on the premises.”
I always wondered if part of the training for building security was to learn unnecessary vocabulary like “vacate” and “visual reconnaissance.” Before I could “assuage” the man’s concern, Rosie resolved it her way.
“Fuck off,” she said and rode her bike out of the building. “I’ll call you if anything else comes through,” she shouted to me.
Back in my office, I spread the contents of the package out on the table. It was a series of documents from the City of Los Angeles, Department of City Planning. On a note stuck to one of the papers, I recognized Claire’s writing, it said: “Final presentation for the Wed meeting.”
They were mainly legal documents with enough jargon and legalese to make it read like a foreign language. Where the security guards had “premises,” the lawyers had “pursuant.” It must have made them both feel special to be a part of a club that had its own language. Near the back of all this nonsense was something that caught my eye.
It was a map of eastern LA crisscrossed with a dizzying array of shapes and colors that resembled a Jackson Pollock painting. The colors represented the various zones, sub-zones, overlay zones, and whatever-kind-of zones that carved up the city. It looked like the plan of a schizophrenic: the result of decades’ worth of wrangling, manipulation, special-interest lobbying, compromise, and bribery—the bastard child of a city conceived over a lust for land. And it was all about to change.
Directly behind this map was a second one of the same area, only with some tweaks to the zones. Apparently Zone 8 was being revised. The original Zone 8 stretched from the upper-middle-class neighborhood of South Pasadena into parts of Highland Park. The proposed additions were two streams that dribbled south off the hills of Montecito Heights down into Lincoln Heights where, by the time they ended, they were no more than a block wide.
I didn’t have to research the significance of this change, because it was already abundantly clear—the revised zone would now include Carmen’s women’s center, the Deakins Building, and the forced-sale homes on Holcolm Street.
There was some good old-fashioned gerrymandering going on between Claire and McIntyre. I assumed the manipulation of zones had to benefit Valenti’s project, the Arroyo.
I did a quick internet search on the Area Planning Commission proposing these changes. Timothy Carlson had once been employed by the mega-contractor Simons & Siefort, which along with Valenti’s firm had developed much of the former farmland in Irvine. Valenti eventually absorbed Simons & Siefort, but it was unclear if Carlson had made the transition with the purchase. At various points in his career, he’d sat on several corporate boards, including Signature Homes, one of the phone numbers Ed had called from the Resting Room. A quick search revealed that Signature Homes was the real estate division of Valenti’s concept malls and fell under the group McIntyre controlled. The office addresses of Signature Homes and Valenti’s operation were identical.
“Starting to feel a little incestuous,” I said to Mike. I heard him chuckle on the other end of the phone.
“Cast a light on the power structure that shapes this city and you quickly realize it’s a small, tight-knit group with few rotating members,” he explained. “It lets you get things done within the bureaucracy. The great flaw, however, is the same one that plagued the royal families—when you exclude new blood from entering your circle you end up having to fuck your sister.”
“Then we need to figure out who’s screwing whom.”
“Follow the money,” Mike said. “Area Planning Commissions operate off an ever-shrinking, taxpayer-funded budget and an ever-growing pool of development fees paid for by the mega-contractors. It’s also an appointed position,” he added.
“By whom?”
“Better to ask who confirms them,” he corrected. “Councilman Abramian is Carlson’s main backer. Sounds like another back-office deal.”
“Not yet,” I said.
Claire’s note made mention of a Wednesday meeting. A quick internet search returned a little-publicized event happening that afternoon: Notice of Public Hearing, Zone 8 Revisions.
“Sounds like they’re going to actually have someone from the public in attendance,” Mike surmised.
I quickly invented a dentist appointment and hurried down the hill toward City Hall.
A LESSON IN CIVIC DUTY
City Hall was a large, white obelisk that once stood as the tallest structure in Los Angeles—that is, until engineers figured out how to build fifty-story steel-and-glass structures on rollers. These towering marvels could withstand the rocking and rolling of an 8.0 earthquake. They were the symbols of the new downtown, but that didn’t mean the city catered to them. City Hall may have been surpassed in height, but the institutional power of this town would forever be contained within its walls.
The public entrance led into a dimly lit lobby with stone floors whose patina could only come from decades of floor wax and weekly polishing. Original wall sconces and colored shades cast the area in a cathedrallike hue that, when paired with the subtle echoes from the coffered ceiling, gave you a sense of urgency to find a seat before Mass started.
I made my way to the creaky elevators and the fifth floor, where the public hearing was being held for the requested zone changes. It was your typical municipal government forum. The room could hold a hundred people, but only the official participants and their administrators actually showed. That didn’t stop them from using microphones to speak to each other even though the entire group sat within a twenty-foot radius.
“Sit anywhere?” I asked the security guard stationed at the door.
He looked at me and then the empty rows of chairs and then back to me. He didn’t have the energy to give a verbal response.
“I guess you aren’t expecting a big turnout,” I joked and headed for a seat.
As I chose my chair in the last row, I realized I was being watched intently by the seven committee members at the dais. They seemed perplexed that someone from the public would actually attend a public forum. Or it could have been that my badly bruised face hinted that a deranged, rather than a civic-minded, individual was in attendance.
The agenda was long and convoluted and read aloud by an overweight technocrat in a rumpled suit who had a voice that could cure insomnia. The zone change was somewhere near the end of the list of things they had to discuss, so I had to endure a full hour of motions, seconds, and approvals.
The technocrat was a special breed of middle-class American quite distinct from his corporate cousins. Both were sentenced to a life’s work of quiet oblivion, but where the corporate cogs fabricated their relevance through mission statements and anniversary milestones, the bureaucrat resigned himself to an existence of little consequence and instead focused all of his efforts on accruing tenure so as to retire with maximum benefits.
“Item 752B,” announced the clerk, “proposed revision of municipal cod
e as pertains to division 621, Zone 8.”
I jolted upright as the blood coursed back through my body. The technocrat had somehow managed to lull me into a deep REM sleep. I scanned the room. There were two new people in attendance. The first sat at the conference table before the dais. He wore a casual blazer that looked expensive, an open-collared shirt, and smart, tortoise-framed glasses. It was a look that only the very young or the very wealthy could pull off. Even the overhead fluorescent lights couldn’t wash out that wonderfully golden tan that one got from yachting or playing tennis.
The other person who had joined the hearing was Claire. We caught eyes and acknowledged each other through a look. Or, more accurately, I stared and she just glared.
“Mr. Carlson?” the clerk announced to the gentleman at the conference table. It was his signal to speak. As Carlson read through his motion, I got the sense that he didn’t understand the language or grasped its content. One of the committee members even had to correct him a few times. At one point the clerk asked if there were any objections to the requested revision. I found myself being stared down by all seven members of the committee. Carlson slowly turned in my direction as well. Claire trained her eyes on the floor as if praying that I wouldn’t speak.
But I felt the need to say something. Exactly what I should say was a mystery. I gingerly made my way forward to the microphone set up in the aisle.
“Hello?” I said, tapping the microphone to see if it was on.
“Go ahead, sir,” instructed one of the committee members. “State your name and occupation, please.”
“Charles Restic, human resources manager,” I said and watched as Carlson wrote down my name.
“Did you have a comment?” asked another committee member. They appeared increasingly annoyed by my presence.
“I do,” I said.
“The floor is yours.”
“Can I ask a question to Mr. Carlson?”
“You will address all comments to the committee and the committee will determine whether to pursue any further questioning of Mr. Carlson.”
“Well, that doesn’t make much sense,” I muttered, not entirely meaning to say it out loud.
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