“How’d you get the rest of the vouchers?”
“We work with more brokers than just Langford. It’s better to spread the work around. If it’s limited to just a few they start to think they can exert pressure on the price. We prefer to keep the fear factor high. Having them constantly looking over their shoulders to see if a competitor is going to take a chunk of their kill helps us keep the costs down.” Lawyers preferred hunting analogies, despite the fact that the majority of attorneys wouldn’t know how to shoot a gun if given the opportunity.
“How much information do you give these brokers?”
“On what we’re doing? Just enough to get what we need but not enough to screw us over with.”
“So no one would know where they were actually going to build the Arroyo?”
“Some didn’t even know that it was Valenti on the buying end. The sharper, more experienced brokers knew, of course.”
“Was Langford one of the sharp ones?”
“He was.”
“Did Carmen know?”
“I doubt it.”
I recalled the name of the buyer on the buildings on Holcomb Street. Mike was able to track down the name Salas to a PO box in the Valley, but from there it was a dead end. We’d assumed it was just another shell company owned by Valenti to throw any speculators off his scent. I asked Claire about the name Salas.
“I know all the names of his shell companies, but I never heard of that one,” she said. “Who are they?”
“They bought an entire block of apartment buildings near the Deakins. Temekian and his thugs pressured the owners into selling, so we assumed they were connected to Valenti.”
“We didn’t do any occupancy deals with them. That much I know. It sounds to me like someone heard about our interest in the occupancy vouchers and bought up some land thinking that’s where the development was going. Speculation can be a risky game.”
“So the Arroyo is not being built anywhere near the Deakins.”
She shook her head rather than replying verbally. I was treading on an area that was very dangerous for Claire. We had already gone over a level past “confidential” and were entering territory that could very well ruin her career if it got out that she’d given me this information. For someone who cared as much about her career as she did, this could not have been an easy thing to agree to.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be discreet with the information you’re giving me.”
“Discreet with what?” she asked.
That was when she pulled an envelope out of her bag and slid it over to me. Later that evening, when I had time to peruse the envelope’s contents, I realized that it contained all the voucher transactions involved in the Arroyo project. It also included information on the actual site of the new concept mall. It was going to be much farther north from the Deakins, close to the actual arroyo for which it was named. It was to abut a row of Victorian mansions, now under the care of a historical society that served as the sole reminder of the area’s celebrated past. Claire had chosen to photocopy all of the documents to eliminate any kind of electronic trail. At the bar I simply tucked it into my bag, like we were two spies passing state secrets.
“These things are hitting me already,” Claire said as she downed the last drops of her drink.
“One more?”
“Then what?” she asked.
I knew what she was referring to. That old routine was hovering around us. Dusk and sweetened whiskey and jukebox standards were conspiring against us. We bathed in a pleasant melancholy in which neither of us wanted to be alone.
“Bourbon makes me nostalgic,” she said. “I gotta fight it.”
We settled up and stumbled out onto the street, where the next generation waited patiently in line for the hand-off. The evening traffic was beginning to die down, and there was a chill that seemed to come from above and pool around us. I walked Claire back to her car in a lot a few blocks away. We were in a quiet corner of the near-empty expanse of asphalt. We hugged and she put her arms underneath my coat and I felt her cold hands through my shirt. She buried her face into my neck, and I felt her warm breath on my skin.
“I miss you,” she said, but not in a way that meant come back.
RIALTO
I fucking hate cops,” the man grunted, stuffing the rest of his Dodger Dog in his mouth.
In the middle half of the third inning, the public address announcer had invited all of us to stand and honor five heroes from the Los Angeles Police Department, the LA County Sheriffs, and Glendale PD. Cheli was the only woman among the bunch. She was awarded the Medal of Heroism in part for her conduct in the Temekian affair. A bunch of suits shook hands and posed for photographs as they pinned a ribbon on the lapel of her blazer. Cheli was only one of five honorees, but she clearly held sway in the group. When it was her time to get the award, the other recipients applauded.
I’d called her to discuss the recent developments regarding the vouchers. That’s when she told me about the ceremony and that I should come and we could talk it over there. From my seat I could see her beaming. I knew how much it meant to her. To stand among this group of men was probably more enjoyable to her than whatever medal she added to her curio cabinet.
The group of heroes was quickly shuttled off the field so the game could continue. I left my seat and headed back to the ramp. A few fans approached the officers and shook their hands. The public’s attitude toward the police was polarized—it was either unfaltering respect or outright hatred.
I hovered nearby to allow for more photographs, handshakes, and pats on the back. I noticed an older Latina standing to my right. Outfitted in a cheap dress and sandals, she patiently watched the proceedings. I found myself intrigued by this woman, who clearly wasn’t here for the game. She flinched when the computergenerated clapping blared from speakers overhead. Each time she cupped both hands over her ears until it stopped. She looked like she was heading to a church social, and probably was by the look of the bulge in her handbag, about the size of a Bible.
The glad-handing show was nearly complete, and Cheli and I made eye contact. She smiled and waved me over. I gave her a quick hug and she took my arm and led me over to the older woman.
“Chuck, this is my mom, Efigenia.”
I studied her up close. She had dark, tired eyes and lids that struggled to stay open. Her sandals were too small and the sides of her feet, heavily calloused from much walking, spilled over the edges. Her perfume smelled like the lobby of a convalescent home. There was a resemblance to Cheli somewhere in the color of her eyes and bump in her nose, but I’d always thought seeing resemblances like that was a trick our minds played on us. If told two strangers were sisters, you’d find similarities between the two that didn’t exist.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said to the old woman. “You must be very proud of your daughter.”
Efigenia nodded and stood there quietly looking around at all the people. By the expression on her face, this wasn’t a place she wanted to be. She clutched at her purse with both hands like it was her only worldly possession.
“Pretty good show out there,” I said to Cheli, flicking the medal on her lapel. “And a nice little piece of hardware.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Let’s go up to the Stadium Club. They’re holding a reception for us.” We made a move toward the elevator, but her mom didn’t follow. “Come on, Mom, there’s a party upstairs. They have a buffet.”
Efigenia stood her ground. She said something to Cheli in Spanish. I didn’t understand it but I could read the body language. Her mother wasn’t interested in the party.
“Just for a little bit. It will be fun,” she pleaded cheerily.
Again the woman responded in Spanish. What was communicated clearly irritated Cheli. She pursed her lips, trying to contain her frustration. “I think he can manage to make his own dinner this one time,” she said.
The woman was immovable. Every plea in English was met with a Spanish dismissal,
and with each exchange Cheli grew more frustrated and her mother more intractable, gripping that handbag harder and harder like it was a rescue line.
“This is great, Mom. Thanks for all the support. Just once you’d think you could be there for me and share in my success. It’s okay,” she said brightly but not masking her true feelings. “It doesn’t bother me. It’s not like I’m missing anything that was there before. You see how it is,” she turned to me and spoke as if the old woman were no longer there. “Remember I told you about Latino families? You said all families are that way, but seriously, can you imagine your own mother acting like this?”
She laughed shrilly, and I felt sorry for her. Her voice was at a pitch to draw the attention of those around us, and the gawkers got a free show while they waited in line for their beer. “But what do you expect from someone who didn’t feel the need to come to her own daughter’s wedding? Everyone was too good for Don, but nobody had any problem living in the house he paid for. No doubt El Principe didn’t have any issue sitting on his fat ass for free.”
Cheli had reached a point of hysteria in which resignation overrode her feelings of anger toward her mother. Her voice got soft, quiet, almost sing-songy. “All these years, all the sacrifices, all the things I had to do.” She found her composure and managed a smile. “I am going to go upstairs and enjoy myself like I should. I can’t help it if you don’t want to come.”
She turned and joined a group of people heading upstairs to the party. I stayed behind, as did her mother. The old woman loosened her grip on her purse and slowly headed for the exit. I gave her a few moments then followed her out the same gate. Playing over in my head was the same line, “all the things I had to do.”
I couldn’t risk trying to find my car in the expansive parking lot. If I did, there was no way I could loop back and locate Cheli’s mother. Near the gate’s exit, I spotted a line of black cars whose drivers were whiling away the time. A lot of corporate guys hired cars to drive them to the game so they could get loaded and not have to worry about driving home. I approached one of the drivers and offered him three hundred bucks to drive me. He was an older black man with watery eyes and a permanent sheen like skin fresh out of a hot shower.
“How long and how far?” he replied.
I told him I didn’t know, but if we didn’t make it back by the time the game was over, I’d double his fee.
“Hop in,” he said.
I instructed the driver to follow Efigenia from a short distance. I didn’t know where her car was parked and didn’t want to lose her out of the several exits off the plateau. The driver was tickled with his assignment.
“Never did a tail job before,” he said with a smile.
Dodger Stadium’s parking lot was a blooming flower emanating from the bud of the ballpark. The various parking sections were layered on top of two arterial roads that ringed the stadium. The roads eventually led to the main stem that funneled cars inside from Sunset Boulevard.
“She park in the last row?” the driver asked out loud and soon got an answer. Efigenia limped her way across the hot asphalt toward the outer layer of parking sections marked by letters deep into the alphabet. But she didn’t stop there. She crossed the last section and continued on past the ticket booths and down the hill to Sunset. Three times she had to pause to catch her breath. The driver and I shared the same guilty feeling of watching an old woman struggle while we sat idly a safe distance behind her.
“This isn’t as much fun as I thought it would be,” he said.
She waited at a bus stop on Sunset while we parked across the street from her. We sat there for nearly an hour before an express bus arrived.
“Let’s see where it takes us,” I instructed the driver.
We followed it through a numbing number of stops along Cesar Chavez before the express bus finally turned into its namesake and merged onto the freeway heading east out of the city toward San Bernardino. I placed a call to Detective Ricohr.
“You’re still at it?” he asked.
“As you are,” I answered.
Ricohr didn’t acknowledge that remark directly.
“Lots of loose ends on this one,” he admitted.
“I have an idea on tying some up.”
“Is that right?”
“But I need your help.”
I explained what I wanted him to do. He didn’t reject my request, but he didn’t jump all over it either.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “You sure about this?”
I told him the truth. “I’m pretty sure.”
There was a long pause and then he said, “Good enough for me.”
I hung up, leaned my head against the seat, and enjoyed the crisp chill of the sedan’s air conditioning. It felt like it was going to be a long ride. Outside my window scrolled a landscape of relentless urban sprawl. Leaving Los Angeles by freeway robbed you of the satisfaction of escape. Unlike other cities, there was no light-switch moment on the way out of town when the urban chaos decisively converted into suburban tranquility. The parts outside Los Angeles felt remarkably similar to the ones inside, except the buildings had the luxury of being placed a foot or two farther apart, which at seventy miles per hour was impossible to discern.
The bus led us into the Inland Empire. To the north the mountains loomed overhead through a pink-gray haze. Below was a flat expanse latticed with high-tension wires and concrete freeways. There was little natural shade in this area. Numerous times we crossed mile-wide gullies piled with boulders from the range above and now bleached bone-white in the relentless summer sun. As we passed San Bernardino, we started to see the developments.
From a distance, entire swaths of land were covered in a terra-cotta canopy, a result of the near-ubiquitous use of the same petroleum-engineered roofing tiles. The developments that blanketed the area rolled effortlessly from hill to hill and were corralled by high walls demarcating where the community ended and the virgin land began. Everything was washed in earth tones—ochre and slate and sand—but there was nothing natural about it. Each development felt like it was manufactured elsewhere and plopped randomly in this random stretch of land.
The houses behind the stucco walls were laid out with orange-grove symmetry and placed so tightly together that you and your neighbor could read off the same morning newspaper. All the homes had the same design: a two-story, 2,600-square-foot manse comprising four bedrooms, two and a half baths, and an open floor plan with the additional features of a two-car garage, dual-paned windows, and double-hung doors. The original designer of these homes had a thing for even numbers. The names of the developments sounded Italian or Spanish, but were neither. As with every other element in the community, they were designed to recall a Mediterranean Eden. The developers sold the bliss of the Southern European countryside to people who had never traveled farther east than Las Vegas. The developments had just enough ironwork, stone fountains, and gravel courtyards to evoke the atmosphere of a “villa” but without the risk of getting sued for false advertising.
The express bus pulled off the highway into one of the first developments in the area. A giant sign announcing the entrance to the Rialto spanned a four-lane road. Efigenia exited the bus and made her way through one of the small gates. We gave her some space and then followed a safe distance behind her.
I marveled at the emptiness. There were no children in sight and very little activity at all. Homes with for-sale signs outnumbered homes without them. Every third driveway had a car parked in it. The rest were empty. Yellowing newspapers piled up on doorsteps because the owners hadn’t bothered to cancel their subscriptions. Lawns were unmowed, and the desert hardscape crept out from underneath. They’d kept the wild at bay with their towering walls but once the spigot was turned off, the land quickly reverted to its natural state.
This was the epicenter of the housing crisis. While Los Angeles took a haircut during the housing bust, San Bernardino County took its cut at the knees. To the thousands of people
who bought into that Mediterranean dream through the magic of no money down and the negative amortization mortgage, this was a hopeless proposition. The entire area was drowning in underwater mortgages. Even those few who still had jobs and could afford their monthly payments were facing twenty years of never recouping what they’d paid for their homes. The bright ones just walked away, and so the vicious cycle continued.
Efigenia concluded her long journey at one of these nameless houses quite indistinguishable from the rest. She plodded up the walkway and went inside. I told the driver to pull over at the corner and instructed him to come back in twenty minutes. Before he could say anything, I gave him a hundred dollars to assuage his fear that all this had been one big swindle to get a free ride out to San Berdoo.
I gave it a few minutes before approaching the house. It was unnervingly quiet out there. The sun felt hotter than back in Los Angeles. I was already sweating, and my arms began to itch in the heat. I rang the bell and anxiously waited on the front stoop. At last the front door opened and a middle-aged man blinked at me through the screen door.
“Mr. Salas?” I asked.
EL PRINCIPE AND HIS COURT
Yeah?”
Cheli’s brother was about my height but with a pronounced pot belly and cheeks that were beginning to resemble jowls. He had a couple of old tattoos on his arms where the ink was bleeding into the skin, making it difficult to read the lettering.
“I work with your sister,” I told him.
“Oh yeah? You a cop, too?”
“No.” I laughed. “I’m not on the force. I do contract work with them. Anyway, Cheli was talking up this area. She said there’s a lot of homes you can buy up cheap, so I thought I’d drive out here and check it out for myself.”
“Cheap, you don’t know cheap. Half this shit’s empty. It’s like a ghost town, man.”
“Yeah, it looks that way. How long have you lived here?”
“In this house?” he said and thought it over. “Not even a month. We’ve been bouncing around.”
The Silent Second Page 20