The Silent Second

by Adam Walker Phillips

  “Is that right? Where were you before that?” I tried to keep it breezy and not make it feel like an inquisition.

  “Let’s see. We were over in Covina for a few months then we had to get out of there. We stayed with some cousins for a while.” I remembered the night Mike was killed, the last thing he said was that he wanted to check up on a lead out in Covina but wanted to wait until traffic died down. “Before that we had the back unit in Azusa after we lost the house in Rosemead.”

  “That’s a lot of bouncing around.”

  “No doubt. My sister and her crazy real estate deals. She always got something going and always got us moving somewhere. What she don’t understand is it’s hard on me and my mom. I take care of my mom. She’s getting old and needs the help, you know. I take her to the doctor and her appointments, but it’s hard when we keep moving.”

  “Sounds like she’s got a good son,” I said. He liked that. In his self-absorbed delusions, the Prince who had been taken care of all his life started to believe he was the caretaker. I wondered how the money worked. I was certain Cheli was the main source of funding for this household but wanted to confirm it. “Must be hard finding work out here,” I commiserated.

  “Me, I’m on disability so I can’t really work. But it’s tough, bro. Money don’t go very far.” Far enough to buy this house, I thought. El Principe was looking more and more like a harmless rube, completely oblivious to the chaos going on around him. His name was on the deeds to properties that were at the root of four murders, and he didn’t seem to know anything about it. “You know, an Armenian friend of mine was also talking about this area. His name is Temekian. Ardavan Temekian.” I waited for any kind of reaction. I got none. “Do you know him?”

  “He doesn’t know any of them,” I heard a voice behind me.

  Cheli stood on the walk. Her eyes were shielded behind dark shades, and she still had the ribbon from the ceremony pinned to her lapel. In her other hand she casually held a gun by her side.

  “Why are we out here talking? Let’s all go inside,” she suggested. I didn’t have much of a choice. I quickly glanced down the street but didn’t see the car or my driver.

  “Where’s your car?” she asked. “Did you come with someone?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t see him.”

  She thought it over. “Maybe he’ll show up later.”

  We went inside and Cheli motioned for me to sit on the couch while she hung by the front door. The room was sparsely decorated. It didn’t look like they used more than two or three rooms in the house. There was nothing permanent about the space—no pictures on the walls, the TV haphazardly placed on a couple of milk crates. There were still moving boxes stacked in the corner as if in anticipation of another frantic uprooting. From the other room came the sounds and smells of Efigenia preparing dinner.

  “My mom’s making posole if you guys want to stay for dinner,” El Principe offered. The poor woman had barely gotten home before having to slave away in the kitchen.

  “We’re fine,” Cheli answered.

  El Principe wasn’t all that sharp, but he quickly picked up on the tension between Cheli and me and quietly shuffled out of the room. As soon as he was gone, I turned to Cheli.

  “Why did you kill them?”

  Cheli gave me the once-over.

  “Lift up your shirt and turn around,” she instructed. She wanted to make sure I wasn’t wearing a wire. I did as requested and sat back down. “How did you say you got out here?”

  “I told you, someone drove me.”

  “Who did?”

  “I paid a car service.”

  “All the way out here? Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Cheli called out to her mother in the next room. Efigenia appeared in the doorway and wiped her hands with an old rag. Cheli spoke to her in Spanish, but her mother barely seemed to listen. The old woman kept wiping her hands with the rag despite the fact they were already dry. Cheli rattled off a string of instructions but the faster she spoke the more her mother began shaking her head. The old woman stared blankly at the soiled carpet. Whatever Cheli was pitching, Efigenia wanted no part of it.

  “Listen to me for once,” she told her mother. “We have to get out of here!”

  Efigenia finally had enough. She dismissed her daughter with a condescending wave of the towel and returned to the kitchen to finish dinner.

  “They never get it,” Cheli ranted to herself. “Why am I the only one who tries to make things better? They just sit here and accept it as if this were all there is.” She gestured to the less-than-modest living room. “Like they don’t deserve better.”

  “They seem happy, Cheli.”

  “Content,” she countered, “but not happy. And don’t lecture me. Maybe you had it easy, but I’ve scratched for everything I got. I scratched for them and for that one big payday so I wouldn’t have to scratch anymore.”

  “There is no payoff. Valenti isn’t going to build anywhere near those properties you own. They’re worthless, just like they were before you bought them.” She stopped pacing and studied me as I continued. “Langford played you. He let you think Valenti was going to build the next concept mall by the Deakins Building, but they’re breaking ground ten miles up the road near South Pas. All Langford wanted from you was help securing the vouchers.”

  “What vouchers?” she asked. I walked through all the details regarding the occupancy vouchers. The pain of the realization that she had been duped started to show on her face. In an odd way, I felt sorry for her. She sat down on a rocking chair by the door and stared vacantly at the floor.

  “I imagine it all started with Ed,” I continued. “Langford needed to close on the Deakins but Ed balked. Langford didn’t tell you the reason, but I imagine it was because Ed had found out about the treasure trove of vouchers he was sitting on and wanted to get paid for them. So Langford calls you in to apply some pressure. Maybe you’d done this sort of thing in the past for him when he and your husband were working deals. And you certainly had the contacts in the Armenian community who could put some fear into Ed to get him to shut up and accept the original offer. It got out of control and I guess we’ll never know who actually pulled the trigger—you or Temekian. The call Ed made to the Glendale Police the day he died makes sense now. I thought it was because he was worried, but he was actually calling you. He didn’t know what he was walking into that night.”

  I took a moment to gauge her condition. It was hard to read so I pressed on.

  “At this point you got greedy. Langford was purposely hazy about the details behind the Arroyo. He didn’t want you to know where they were actually going to build the mall because you might make things difficult for him. But you saw a big payday. As soon as they break ground, values on the homes right around it will skyrocket. And so you bought up some properties—with the help of Temekian’s muscle—before the news got out that the next, great Valenti creation was opening up in Lincoln Heights.

  “What was the deal—you get Temekian to apply a little Armenian mob pressure in exchange for scuttling whatever investigation was on him at the time? At first his arrest confused me. If you two were working together, why would you bring him in? But then I figured it out—it was a warning. You didn’t want him cutting any deals. If he stuck to the plan, you wouldn’t feed him to the wolves. But that was the plan all along—make him the fall guy.

  “Only problem was Temekian was no dummy. He saw it coming and approached me first. I wondered why he was so afraid of the police that he wanted an intermediary. He wasn’t afraid of the police as much as he was afraid of you. Poor guy didn’t know we had a relationship. He thought I set him up when you confronted him at the motel. He died thinking I had a hand in sealing his fate.”

  That part hurt—that someone went to his grave believing in his heart that I had betrayed him. That and the needless death of my friend.

  “Why did you kill Mike?”

  “Because he found out about t
hem,” she answered dully, motioning to her mother and brother obliviously eating their dinner in the room next to us. “I overheard him mention Covina and knew what it meant. I tried to head him off but it was too late.”

  Then it made sense why Mike died where he did, the way he did.

  “You pulled him over with the siren. Why else would he get off the freeway in that part of town and casually wait with his window down for someone to approach his car? He thought it was the CHP nabbing him for speeding.”

  “If we walk out that front door, will there be police?”

  I laughed. It was the first response that came to me. “You’re not even listening to me. It’s over. It’s all over—”

  “Shut up!” she snapped, and the gun jerked up and pointed right at me. She stood over me and looked down at me over the sight of the gun. “I asked you if there will be police.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Stand up,” she said coolly, and for the first time since I entered that house I was convinced she was going to shoot me. Nothing significantly had changed—her voice was the same, the look in her eyes was the same, her demeanor was unchanged. It just felt like my death was close by.

  “I asked Detective Ricohr to run a test on the gun you planted by Temekian. The one they found in the alley—the one you put there. You went back to your car and got it while I stayed by the body. Ricohr’s going to see if it’s the same gun that your husband used to kill himself.”

  “Don’s gun?” she whispered.

  “It will link you to the three murders.”

  “Don’s gun?” she said again. I started to see fissures forming in her fragile shell. Her eyes darted erratically across the room. “No one ever liked Don,” she said sadly and with a great release, like a giant exhale came over her and the room. Something ended in that moment. “All we wanted was to make something of ourselves,” she added as the gun fell harmlessly by her side. Cheli looked at me with peace in her eyes.

  “I tried,” she said.

  Cheli walked out of the living room and into the kitchen. I heard a door in the back open and then rattle shut. And then I heard nothing more.

  SMILE NOW, CRY LATER

  Yucaipa Police found her car the following day during a routine patrol of a small industrial complex just off the freeway. Cheli was in the driver’s seat. She had a single gunshot wound to the head, and her body was propped up by the seatbelt, which remained fastened. There was no note.

  For the second time I was sequestered in my Lincoln Heights apartment while the details were ironed out. The county of Los Angeles wasn’t in the business of prosecuting dead people for the crimes they committed; there were too many living defendants to worry about. As a result, the four murders linked to Cheli went unsolved. That wasn’t to say the police hadn’t built a strong case against her. Detective Ricohr had had his suspicions all along but was never able to tie anything directly to her. He did follow up on my request to link the gun that killed Easy Mike and the one that Cheli’s ex-husband used. They came back a match, and the police left it at that.

  Across the way, Glendale’s force faced quite a backlash in the press for having someone deep within their ranks involved in such heinous crimes. A few fringe groups dusted off old gripes and called for reforms, but the requests went unanswered. As far as scandals went, this one had little impact. The public didn’t seem to mind. For them it was more a confirmation of a long-held opinion than anything else. The Glendale force was always dirty, and this just further proved it. It was, after all, difficult to besmirch an already-blackened reputation. As they had done in the past, the Glendale PD bided its time until the chatter dissipated and everyone moved onto another story.

  I never knew what happened to Cheli’s mom or brother. After calling the police, I left them as they were, at the table quietly eating their dinner and completely oblivious to the chaos that surrounded their lives. They never showed much interest in Cheli’s rise, and they showed equal disinterest in her downfall.

  One day close to the holidays I ran into Detective Ricohr in Little Tokyo. We hadn’t spoken in months. We talked mostly about the weather and almost nothing about the case. We made a promise to meet up for lunch sometime, knowing that it was just a pleasantry and that we’d never actually try to find the time. Surprisingly, two days later I got a call from him.

  “How about we meet for that lunch?”

  We met at a sandwich shop near my office. Before we could get past even hellos, he plopped a giant accordion folder on the table. It was the case file.

  “I can’t let you take it with you but I can disappear for an hour while you look through it.”

  I studied the giant folder.

  “Why’d you bring this?”

  “You seem like a guy who wants some answers.”

  He was a good detective. Much like Easy Mike had a desire to know the details behind his father’s death, I had this need to try to understand Cheli’s final day. I wanted some sort of narrative to ground what was otherwise a senseless waste of people’s lives.

  “Last week I drove out to the lot where they found her car,” I said.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “I’m not sure,” I answered truthfully. I had stood in the flat, desolate parking lot for three hours searching for any kind of detail to latch onto that would provide even a hint of motivation for the destructive path she had taken leading up to that final act when she took her life. We’re always looking for order in the chaos.

  “Did you find anything?” he asked.

  “No.”

  There was nothing poignant in Cheli’s death. It would have been cleaner if the gun that had killed her husband, Ed Vadaresian, Langford, and my friend Mike was the same one that took her life, but that gun was some seventy miles away locked in a police evidence locker. She instead used her service revolver, the same one that murdered Ardavan Temekian.

  I studied the folder and its bulging contents, but I no longer wanted to know what was inside. More scraps of information weren’t going to satisfy what was gnawing at me. “It’s okay,” I told Detective Ricohr, “I don’t want to know the details.”

  The Arroyo broke ground on a hot Wednesday morning the following year. There was the usual uproar from the South Pas neighborhood council over congestion issues, but Valenti was able to ram this one through. A lot of that had to do with the secrecy behind the project. Despite the information I had stirred up, the location and announcement of the development surprised residents and gave them little time to rally their troops against it. Plus, everyone in this city likes malls.

  There was no uproar over Carmen Hernandez’s women’s center, which started construction with little fanfare about six months later—public money always took longer to fund than the private sector’s. Her project was in a neighborhood that no one who mattered really knew or cared much about, and thus there was no opposition, despite the fact that taxpayer money paid for it.

  The Arroyo ceremony was covered on the local evening news, all twenty seconds of it. Valenti opted for cornerstone symbolism rather than the shiny shovel routine. He traced the name of his latest conquest into a just-poured, ceremonial concrete pillar. Behind him, McIntyre clapped enthusiastically like a mother at a children’s beauty pageant. Everyone in the shot looked extremely proud of their achievement. Just off camera a lackey with a dampened towel waited to clean off Valenti’s hands.

  I didn’t see Claire in the brief footage they showed, but I knew she was there, as we had been speaking more regularly for several months. The words “quick” and “amicable” aren’t often used to describe a divorce, but Claire and I managed to achieve both. We got together and handled it all ourselves. It was the right thing to do—at least that’s what everyone said—but it still felt awful. We split the assets evenly. She got to keep the house in Beachwood Canyon, so I guess she got the better end of the deal, but it really didn’t bother me. It was already more her house than mine.

  Some weeks later I
decided it was time to finally leave Lincoln Heights and end my self-imposed exile. I purchased a modest house in Eagle Rock and set out plans to “kick-start” my life (a new associate who was a Harley-Davidson enthusiast had recently infused the workplace with a slew of motorcycle analogies). But like those prisoners who dread their pending release, the thought of leaving the apartment in Lincoln Heights filled me with a quiet sorrow that grew more distinct as the final day approached.

  During my final week in the apartment, I was loading up the car for another run to my new home when I ran into my neighbor working on his truck. After all those months, I was finally able to put a face to the music I listened to every night. He was a lot younger than I expected, maybe in his late twenties. He had a perfectly shaved head and wore a Dodger game jersey unbuttoned to show off a mosaic of tattoos. It was a common look among cholos, so common as to border on cliché—the Old English script, the names of several people close to the bearer, some with their too-short lives recalled by birth and death years underneath their names.

  He also had a stylized version of the Greek comedy and tragedy masks that took up almost an entire side of his neck. I remembered Cheli telling me that it represented the life they lived. Everything was certain to end badly—prison or death or both—so why not live it up when you are young and deal with the consequences later?

  “You moving?” he asked. I was always disappointed when people spoke to me in English in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. Just once I wanted to feel like I belonged.

  “Yeah, tomorrow’s my last day.”

  “Good luck, man,” he said and ducked back under the hood.

  “Are you the one who plays the oldies every night?” I asked.

  He sort of smiled and acknowledged it was he.

  “Why do you only play the sad ones?”

  “I only play the good ones,” he corrected.

  I nodded. The best ones always were the saddest.

  “Still depressing, though,” I said with a laugh.