Ground Zero td-84

by Warren Murphy

  "This, my friend, is no mere apartment house."

  "Looks like one. Bigger than some, smaller than most. So what?"

  "What would you say if I told you that this baby will generate more income than a comparable apartment house would if you rented it out for fifty years straight?"

  "Where you plan on building it-Beverly Hills?"

  "Burbank."

  "Burbank! You're dreaming!"

  "No, I'm developing. I'm in development now, Con. Condominium development."

  "There's that word again," Swindell mumbled, staring at the apartment-house model. "How's it work?"

  "Very simply. Inside and out, it looks just like a common apartment house. But you don't rent out the units."

  Swindell licked his teeth. "How do you make money, then?"

  "You sell them."

  "Sell apartments?"

  "No, sell condos," Mullaney said, detaching the plastic-stucco facade from the model building.

  Swindell leaned over to peer inside. He saw tiny apartments containing tiny people seated on tiny furniture.

  "I don't get it," he remarked. "Looks like an ordinary apartment to me."

  "Look, why do people rent?"

  " 'Cause they can't afford to buy. Everyone knows that."

  "Exactly. So with condos they buy their apartments."

  "No one in their right fucking mind would buy a fucking apartment," Swindell said indignantly, deciding his colleague was pulling his chain. "Don't kid a kidder. No one is that crazy."

  "You're right, Con, of buddy. No one would buy an apartment. What would they be buying? The inner walls and floor? The cube of air inside those walls? No way, right? But if you call it a condominium, folks will line right up. And you know why?"

  "No, why?"

  "Because there are so damn many young couples coming up now that there won't be houses enough for all of them. People with fine jobs and plenty of down payment rattling around in their savings accounts. But no houses. You've heard of the baby boom?"

  "Yeah. I was one of the first to drop down the chute, back in forty-six. My old man knocked up my old lady as soon as he got back from Guam. Smartest thing he ever did, if I do say so myself."

  "Well, there's plenty more where you came from. And they've all got an itch to own. Well, I got the solution right here."

  Swindell frowned. "Never work. Not in a million years. You couldn't build these things cheap enough. Look at it, what is it? Stucco facing over concrete butresses? Too expensive. Never work."

  "They will if you price them a third higher than comparable rental units," Morgan Mullaney said smugly.

  "Higher! You nuts?"

  "Hey, if you rent, you're throwing your money away. But if you buy . . ."

  A tiny green gleam came into Connors Swindell's eyes then.

  He left the conference early and sold off his entire residential inventory, using the proceeds to float construction loans.

  Within a year he was building condo apartments from San Diego to Sacramento. And when he ran out of cheap land, he sank his profits into existing apartment houses and converted those into condos. Single-handedly, Connors Swindell initiated the move into condo conversion, which threw old people out of affordable apartments and into despair, but made him too rich to care.

  From a California-based corporation, Swindell Properties Incorporated swept the nation like a forest fire. It built condos, condexes, and co-ops.

  Warehouses fell before him. Apartment houses were exalted by his alchemic touch. By the time he was through, he was razing perfectly healthy schools, churches, fire stations, amusement parks, and even entire tracts of single-family houses, replacing them with sprawling condominium town houses.

  Connors Swindell was on a roll unprecedented in real-estate history. He grew powerful, wealthy, virtually omnipotent. Bankers fought one another for his business. He could float a loan on nothing more than a toothy grin and the collateral in his wallet.

  As the solid 1970's faded into the expansive eighties, Connors Swindell left them all in the dust, including Morgan Mullaney, the man who had first spoken that magic word.

  The secret of his success was simple. Swindell Properties didn't build better condominiums. Nor affordable ones.

  Swindell built pronounceable condominiums. "Call 'em condos," he lectured his growing sales force. "No one's gonna buy what they can't spell." And he was right.

  Once "condo" became a household word, he was unstoppable.

  Then came the stock-market crash of 1987.

  "I can ride this out," Swindell had crowed, and kept on building. So a few yuppies had bitten the big one. The market was going to come roaring back. And it did.

  What didn't come roaring back were the yuppies and the banks. Credit dried up. In a way, he was a victim of his own success. Everybody had plunged into the condo game. Competition was fierce. But demand dwindled. Loans stopped coming. Interest piled up. Defaults followed. The entire nation had been overbuilt. Somehow.

  Almost overnight, it seemed, Connors Swindell went from being the darling of the real-estate industry to a desperate man presiding over a sprawling chain of halted construction projects, nervous lenders, and mounting debt.

  "Somebody explain this to me," Swindell had moaned at a real-estate conference twenty years later. This one in Lake Tahoe.

  No one could. They were all going around wearing the same dazed and vaguely frightened looks on their gloomy faces. Even the ones who had stayed in family homes. Prices there had shot through the roof during the real-estate-as-an-investment mania. Even house prices were flat now. No one could remember it being this bad. "Not since the Great Depression," they lamented.

  After the fourth person had repeated that refrain, Connors Swindell retreated to the men's room to vomit or take a hit of coke. Possibly both.

  He was unzipping his fly when he became aware of a well-dressed man standing before the next urinal. Lean and elegant, he had Princeton written all over him.

  Connors Swindell calculated his age to be roughly eighty.

  "Say, old-timer," he said over the sound of his liquid lunch rushing from his body, "everybody says it ain't been like this since the thirties. You lived through those times. Can you tell me what the future will bring? Are condos defunct?"

  "You want to know why everything flattened out?" the old man asked.

  "Sure."

  "Well, finish up what you're doing and I'll show you."

  Swindell hastily squeezed himself dry and followed the man over to the row of sinks. Instead of washing his hands, the man turned and said, "Got a quarter?"

  "Barely," Connors grunted, fishing into his pockets. He handed the old duffer a quarter. The man turned around and put it into the coin slot of a wall-mounted vending machine. He turned the lever and the machine went thing-chuck! Something flat slid down into a slot.

  The old man held it up to the weak light.

  Swindell saw it was a foil-wrapped package.

  "Are you deaf? This here's a fucking condom. Not a condo."

  "What are these used for, my friend?"

  "If you don't know by now, the information ain't gonna do you much good," Swindell said flatly.

  "This little number protects against unwanted offspring."

  "You ain't making a whole bushel of sense."

  "Think back. When did these items become popular again?"

  "Oh, about four, five years ago, when that AIDS thing started getting out of hand."

  "Exactly. Before that, you couldn't get most young fellas to pull one of these on if it came packaged with Jean Harlow. She was an actress. Made Madonna look like Stan Laurel in drag. He was an actor. Anyway, birth control was a thing the women got saddled with, with their pills and diaphragms and the like. But come AIDS, and it was every man for himself. So to speak."

  "I still don't follow."

  "You got into this business, when? The sixties? Seventies?"

  "Late sixties," Swindell admitted, eyeing the condom. "Why?"
>
  "You, my friend rode the baby boom to success."

  "Don't I know it!" Swindell said fervently.

  "Well, the baby boom just bottomed out. And there ain't no baby boomlet coming along to save your butt. And you can thank that little device you got in your hands for that."

  Connors Swindell regarded the foil package as if seeing it for the first time. And the truth fell on him like a rain of anvils.

  "These fucking things are gonna ruin the business!"

  "Now you know," said the old man, smiling gently. He tossed him the foil packet. Swindell caught it. "Keep it. You paid for it. And I think you're gonna keep paying for it."

  That had been in 1990. The year Connors Swindell got his first inkling he was in for a rough decade.

  But he was a fighter. And a schemer. He wasn't about to go down the tubes with the others. He would find a way to come back.

  And he was doing just that. Sure, the road was rocky. But he was starting a comeback. Step one was to go back to basics. Real houses. Prices were already falling. They'd fall some more. Like stocks. He'd just have to buy cheap and hang on until real estate bounced back.

  Meanwhile, Connors Swindell looked around for the cheapest land he could find. He found it practically in his own backyard. The California desert.

  He traded an entire condo park for a hundred square miles of Indian-reservation desert less than five miles from his Palm Springs office. Arid, endless, and commercially worthless. The Indians who had consummated the deal must have thought they were getting payback for the Manhattan deal.

  What they didn't know was that Swindell's condos had been built from substandard materials over a toxic-waste landfill.

  One day Connors Swindell took a young loan officer out to his desert in a rented jeep. The Little San Bernardino Mountains reared up over the desert-penetrating Colorado River Aqueduct.

  "Nobody builds in the desert," the loan officer was saying. He was a green, wet-behind-the-ears kid. Probably a trainee. That was how little the banks thought of Swindell Properties in 1990.

  "I remember a young realtor once saying that no one would pay good money for an apartment," Swindell pointed out. "Want a drink?" he added, offering a thermos capped by a clear plastic cup.

  "What is it?" the loan officer asked suspiciously.

  "Gatorade. It'll replace the minerals you're sweating away."

  The loan officer accepted the thermos, and uncapping it, poured green liquid into the clear cup. He drank it down greedily.

  "Don't lose the cap. It's important," Swindell said.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Trust me."

  The Gatorade was nearly gone when they reached the spot.

  "Here it is," Swindell said proudly.

  "How can you tell?" asked the loan officer, looking around unhappily. "There's nothing but sand in all directions."

  "My patch has scorpions. Watch your feet."

  Connors Swindell led the young loan officer in his banker's gray to a gently undulating expanse of sand. Swindell carried the thermos with the plastic lid.

  "You are standing on the exact site of the world's first Condome," he announced suddenly, stamping the ground.

  "Did you say condom?" the loan officer said, vaguely offended.

  "Dome. Condome," Swindell repeated, experiencing a momentary flash of deja vu. "Get it right. Condome. I'm gonna sink the first one right where we're standing."

  The loan officer dug a cordovan toe into the sand. He frowned as the loose grains gave way like gritty water.

  "You can't build on sand," he protested. "It won't take the weight of a high-rise."

  "You gotta adjust your thinking if you're gonna do business with me, my friend," Swindell said unctuously. "We're not talking high-rise here. We're talking low-rise."

  "Huh?"

  "Get down on God's beige earth with me, son, and I'll reveal to you the future of real-estate development."

  Connors Swindell sank his knees into the sand.

  "See this here thermos jug?" he asked.

  The banker followed suit, first giving his trouser legs a hitch so the knees wouldn't bag. "Yes."

  "Imagine it's a high-rise tower, like the Capitol Records Building back in L.A. But with a penthouse on top. Under a glass shield kinda shaped like a dome. That's this here cap. Are you with me so far, boy? Are you imagining along?"

  "I believe I can visualize what you're suggesting," the loan officer said without enthusiasm.

  "Now, you watch."

  Pawing away a shallow depression in the sand, Connors Swindell thrust the thermos into it. He pushed it down with both hands, rotating it back and forth. The sand hissed in gritty protest. Slowly the thermos sank into the sand until only the clear plastic cup-lid showed.

  With careful fingers Connors Swindell smoothed the sand around the upside-down lip of the cup until only the clear plastic showed.

  Swindell flashed him an Ipana grin. "Got the picture now?"

  The young loan officer blinked. "I really can't quite grasp what you're trying to convey, Mr. Swindell. "

  "Almost forgot," said Swindell. He reached into a coat pocket and yanked out two HO-scale human figures. He lifted the cup-lid and placed them inside. Then he reclosed the lid.

  The loan officer stared at this for a long time.

  "You gettin' it now?" Swindell prompted.

  "Condome?" His voice was a parched croak.

  "The dome is the penthouse part," Swindell said excitedly. "The guy who lives in the dome pays a premium for all the good healthy sunshine he's gonna have the benefit of. The other ones live down below, where it's nice and cool."

  "And dark."

  "They got new kinda lights now that simulate daylight. I hear they're good for the old biorhythms. People who work nights use 'em to stay happy." Swindell climbed to his feet to toe sand over a scuttling scorpion, burying it. "For windows, we'll give 'em sand paintings."

  The loan officer found his feet, saying, "There is no water in the desert, or electricity."

  "We truck in generators. Self-sufficient. And yuppies don't drink common everyday tap water. Everybody knows that."

  "But it's out in the middle of nowhere."

  "So was Palm Springs. And Las Vegas. They started as dusty villages. But they grew. You know what one of my low-rise Condome towers would be worth planted back in Palm Springs? On dirt-cheap sand?"

  The loan officer understood then. But he had one final reservation.

  "Mr. Swindell, I think your scheme-I mean, idea-has a certain merit, but you're already in arrears to our bank for over seven million dollars. And that does not include principal."

  "Which I ain't never gonna get current on if the condo end of my business goes belly-up," Swindell pointed out firmly.

  "I know that. But to lend a man so deeply in debt even more money-"

  "So he can climb out of debt and pay you back," Swindell prompted.

  "I don't know. The board of directors will be hesitant to extend you additional assistance."

  "Then you remind them of a little proverb I heard recently."

  "And that is?"

  "When a man owes a bank a little money, he's in hot water. But if a man owes the same bank a pile of money-"

  "You don't have to finish it, sir."

  Swindell did anyway. "The bank's in hot water. Wouldn't you rather be in sand?"

  "I'll take it up with the board of directors in the morning," the young loan officer said glumly.

  Swindell started back to the jeep. "You do that. But I already know what the answer's gonna be. I'm too fucking big to go down."

  And he was. Swindell Properties got an immediate line of credit, and construction began that week. The prefab tower went down in one section. It didn't go down as easily as the thermos, but then, it was over two hundred feet long.

  It looked to be a sure thing. Then they started losing construction workers to sunstroke and the scorpions. Insurance premiums went through the roof. The Indians sued hi
m not only over the substandard condos but also to recover the now-valuable Condome land, protesting that its true worth had been concealed.

  Then the worst blow came.

  An engineer brought the bad news to Connors Swindell as he was trying to sink a putt into a tipped wineglass.

  "We have a problem, sir," the engineer said gravely.

  "Throw a lawyer at it," Swindell had growled. "I'm busy."

  "A lawyer won't solve this problem, Mr. Swindell. "

  Swindell swung. The glass shattered. "What is it?"

  "You better come with me."

  Swindell followed the man out of his penthouse office, cozily nestled in a great Plexiglas dome in the desert. Instead of leading him through the climate-controlled airlock and out into the desert heat, the chief engineer escorted him to the main Condome elevator.

  As they rode the lift down, Swindell noticed for the first time that the engineer's boots were damp. He was about to ask how they got that way when the engineer suddenly hit the kill switch.

  The elevator lurched to a stop, nearly upsetting both men.

  "What's wrong?" Swindell demanded. "Generator go again?"

  "This is as far as we can go."

  "What do you mean? This ain't but the twenty-second floor. There's six more to go." He reached for the switch.

  "I wouldn't if I were you," the engineer warned.

  Swindell hesitated. That was when he heard the water. He looked down. His cowboy boots were swimming in brackish water. It was pouring in through the floor seams.

  "Where's this water comin' from!" Swindell howled.

  "We think it's an underground stream. Maybe the water table creeping up."

  "Water!" Swindell burst out. "In the fucking desert?"

  "It happens. Runoff from the mountains has to go somewhere. What doesn't evaporate seeps down into the sand. Sand's porous, you know. Looks like it accumulated down there. Now it's seeping into the Condome shell."

  "Take us up! Take us up!" Swindell said, his eyes sick.

  As the elevator toiled back to the surface, Connors Swindell felt as if he had left his stomach back in the bowels of the greatest advance in housing since the condominium.

  Not to mention his entire future.