by Peter Clines
“I’m surprised you’re not at church yourself,” Andrew said in a neutral tone.
“We’re going to evening services tonight,” said Clive. He checked the tape again and wrote another set of numbers in his notebook.
Andrew dipped his head forward, then forward again. “We’re having starlight services tonight as well,” he said. “Out at Zuma Beach.”
“That’s quite a drive,” said Nate. “What is that, forty-five minutes away? And on a Sunday night.”
“Prayer with good fellows is always worth it,” said Andrew. “And the sound of the waves makes it especially invigorating.”
“Cold, though,” said Nate with a smile.
“I’ve never noticed. The Lord warms us with his presence. What church do you attend, Nate?”
He felt the mine under his foot and sensed others nearby. “I don’t have one at the moment,” he said. “Still looking for somewhere since I moved.”
“Our congregation is selective, but I’d be honored to sponsor you for membership if you’d be interested.”
He tried to find a safe path. “That might be nice,” he said. “Can I get back to you about it later?”
Andrew’s head moved side to side again. “You’re not interested now?”
“I don’t know anything about it now.”
The other man weighed this, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “I suppose,” he said, “although it is a wonderful church. We have so much fun it almost doesn’t feel like worship.”
“Well,” said Clive, “I think I’ve got everything. Thanks, Andrew. We’ll get out of your hair.”
“It was no problem at all,” he said. “Have a wonderful day.” They stepped out and he closed the door after them.
The two of them headed back to Debbie and Clive’s apartment. Debbie had decided to make an early dinner for everyone. Xela had followed the women down after her apartment had been measured, and Debbie had drafted her to set the table. Xela seemed to find being domestic funny as hell. Veek stood off to the side, typing on her phone. “Got everything?” she asked when they walked in.
“I guess we’ll see,” said Nate. He glanced at Debbie and the pots. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
She waved him off. “We’ve got this huge table and we’ve never had enough guests to fill it. It’s fine.”
Clive walked past them to the table. He flipped open his notebook and copied numbers down onto his legal pad blueprints. Math got sketched out in the margins while they passed around spaghetti and sauce. He got up to wash his hands and then came back shaking his head. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“No kidding,” murmured Xela. She peered over at the mess of lines and numbers.
He shook his head again. “No, I mean, this makes no sense at all.” He flipped between pages of the legal pad and held it up for everyone to see. “Okay,” he said, “the exterior walls are just brick. They’re three and a half inches thick everywhere we measured. I’m going to say that’s probably standard throughout the building.”
He traced a line on his blueprints. “The interior walls are another story. They’re anywhere from fourteen to twenty-six inches thick, depending on which ones you’re talking about.”
“Is that normal for an old building?” asked Veek.
“For a pueblo, maybe. Not for anything like this. There’s more, though.” Clive looked across the table at Nate. “You were right about the layouts. There’s something weird going on.”
“I was bound to be right someday,” Nate said, spinning spaghetti onto his fork. “Law of averages.”
Clive pointed across the studio. “Our kitchen and bathroom are over there. Xela’s bathroom is right above ours, so they share the same wall. So that wall has all our pipes in it. Make sense?”
They nodded.
“My bathroom’s different from yours, though,” Xela said through a mouthful of pasta.
“Right, but from a construction point of view there’s no real difference. There’s water pipes and drain pipes. What happens inside the room doesn’t matter. The thing is how stuff gets to and from the room.”
“Okay.”
“Now, here’s where it gets weird,” he said. “Xela’s kitchen is against the opposite wall of her apartment—the outside wall of the building. Same with Veek. You’d think she’d be against the far west wall, the same wall Mandy and Andrew’s apartments use above her. But she’s here,” he pointed at their handmade blueprints and gestured to the far side of the studio, “against this wall. And her kitchen’s against the outside wall of the building.”
Nate looked over at the blueprints. “So what’s the problem?”
“It’s not really a problem,” said Clive, “it’s just weird. You want to minimize the number of walls with pipes in them. That way if something goes wrong you don’t have to make as many holes. Plus, you don’t need to run as many pipes so it’s cheaper, too. All the drains feed into a shared line, all the water branches off a shared line.”
“And that’s not what we’ve got?” asked Veek.
He shook his head. “As near as I can figure, there’s one of two things going on here. One, every apartment has its own set of plumbing running through the walls. Maybe two in some cases, because the bathrooms and kitchens are so far apart. In a building this old, that means there’s more metal in our walls than wood.”
Nate looked at the paneled walls. “And option two?”
“Two is that there are shared lines, but they’re criss-crossing back and forth under the floors to reach different apartments. It’s like trying to go from LA to New York with layovers in Tokyo and London. It’s just exceptionally bad planning.” He shrugged. “I’ve done some plumbing work. Not a ton, but this has to be the most inefficient, expensive way to set up a building I can think of. It’s like they made tons of space inside the walls, then made the plumbing two or three times more complicated than it needed to be so they’d have something to fill it.”
They all looked at each other across the table.
“Or,” said Debbie, “they were making space in the walls for something else.”
Twenty Two
“What if we break open a wall and see what’s inside?” said Veek.
Nate shook his head. “And how are you going to explain that to Oskar?”
“We don’t,” she said. “We keep it quiet, knock out a wall between two apartments so no one in the hallway ever sees anything.”
“It’s not that simple,” said Clive. He used a piece of bread to mop up the last bits of sauce on his plate. “We’d need a way to muffle the noise, even if we just do it with hand tools. And we’d need a way to haul out all the plaster, wood, bricks, and whatever else we find in there.”
“Assuming there is anything in the wall we pick,” said Nate.
“Plus, you’d want a way to hide it if Oskar stops by for something,” added Xela. “It’ll be pretty tough for him not to notice a wall is missing.”
“Anything that falls into the wall would make a racket,” continued Clive. “Some of it might fall all the way to the basement. And then we’d have to get all the supplies to rebuild it past Oskar.”
“Not to mention this place is a national historic landmark,” said Nate. “I think you can get jail time for vandalizing it.”
“Really?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sounds likely though, doesn’t it? Heck, what two apartments would we do it between?” He looked around Clive and Debbie’s cathedral room. “It’s not like we could afford to replace all this woodwork if we did it here.”
“Definitely not,” said Debbie.
The five of them sat around the table and stared at each other for a few moments.
Veek held her finger and thumb a fraction of an inch apart. “We could just make a little hole and shine a light in.”
“You still wouldn’t see anything,” said Xela. “Not unless you were lucky enough to hit a spot where something was.”
“Then we cou
ld put a camera in the hole and look around. A fiber-optics one.”
“Now you’re just being silly,” said Nate.
She sighed. “It’s just frustrating.”
“Well,” said Clive, “it’s about to get more frustrating. I’ve got a five a.m. call tomorrow over at Paramount and I can’t be late.”
“Six more days and he’s in the union,” said Debbie.
“This was awesome though,” Clive said. “Are we going to do more next weekend?”
Their gazes settled on Nate.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We should be careful, though. Oskar’s not going to be happy if he thinks we’re snooping around where we’re not supposed to be.”
“That’s so cute,” said Debbie. “Snooping around.”
Veek sighed.
“Anyway,” said Debbie, “thanks so much for coming over, but everyone get out. My hubby needs his sleep.”
“Did you just call him your hubby?” Xela asked with a grin.
“Yep, now get out.”
“I’ll help you clean up,” Veek offered.
“Out. See you all later.”
Clive nodded at Nate. “Thanks again.”
“Thank you,” said Nate.
“Thanks for dinner,” said Xela.
Debbie shooed them all out with a smile and closed the door behind them.
“I should go, too,” Xela told them. “I’ve got classes tomorrow.” She headed over to the staircase. “It was fun. Count me in for next time.”
Veek walked down the hall to her apartment. “So,” she said, “what are we doing next weekend?
Nate shrugged. “Why are you all asking me?”
“Because you’ve taken the lead.”
“Hardly.”
She looked up at him. The hall light caught her glasses and turned the lenses into white circles on her face. “Are you Fred or Shaggy?”
“Sorry?”
“If I’m Velma, and Xela gets to be Daphne, who’s that make you?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. I think I took a quiz on Facebook once that said I was Scooby.”
“Scooby’s a wuss-out answer,” she said. “Are you the guy in charge or the guy who follows orders and stumbles into stuff?”
“What’s it matter?”
She shrugged. “I just want to know where we all stand. You brought Xela in on what we were doing and handed things over to Clive pretty quickly.”
“Did that bug you? I didn’t think this was supposed to be our own secret investigation.”
Veek shook her head. “No, we all live here. Whatever’s going on, it affects all of us.”
He nodded. “Clive knows way more about construction than I do. He knew what we needed to do and how we needed to do it. It would’ve been stupid not to let him run that whole thing.”
“So you’re delegating,” she said. “Sounds like you’re Fred to me.”
He shook his head. “If anyone’s in charge it’s you. You’re the one who started all this.”
“I started it, but you’ve done more in the past week than I have in almost a year.”
“I’ve just been building off what you started. Speaking of which, I was going to go look some stuff up before I hit the sack.”
“Work tomorrow?”
“Pretty much always. Longest-employed temp in my office.”
“Any benefits at all?”
“They pay me on time. That’s about it.”
“Why’re you still there?”
Nate shrugged. “Nowhere else to go. It’s not like there are tons of jobs, and I don’t have enough in the bank to live off while I look for one.” He shrugged again. “Something better’ll show up. I just try not to think about it.”
“Now you’re sounding like Shaggy.”
He smiled. “Whatever. G’night.”
“Goodnight.”
“I’ll swing by tomorrow or Tuesday, we can figure out what we’re going to do this weekend.”
He was halfway across the lounge when her voice caught up with him. “Fred always went off with Daphne,” she said. “Shaggy always went with Velma.”
“Definitely sticking with Scooby for now, then.”
“Wuss.”
Twenty Three
On Monday Nate managed to spend half the day on the website for the Los Angeles Department of Public Works. He filled out online forms and wrote several emails. In between, he did some data entry and rearranged the bundles in his latest mail crate to make it look like he’d done two or three of them.
On Tuesday he worked his way through pages and pages of old pictures of Los Angeles. There were dozens of sepia-toned photos posted on the web by historical groups and preservation societies. He checked them one after another, watching for anything that looked like his neighborhood or the Kavach Building.
He’d opened, on a guess, his three hundredth tab when Eddie shuffled in. A quick mouse click brought the database back up on his screen. Nate glanced over at his supervisor as if he’d just noticed him. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Don’t come in tomorrow.”
Anne and Zack peeked around their cubicle walls. Nate’s stomach dropped. “Is there a problem?”
One corner of Eddie’s mouth twisted into some indecipherable expression and he shook his head. “They want to make extra money so they’re doing a big issue. The budget’s tight, and they want us all to cut costs.” He patted his thighs with his hands. “All of you are getting your hours cut.”
Zack groaned. Nate thought about his still-withered bank balance. “Cut by how much?”
“Maybe a day a week.”
Zack groaned again. A twenty percent pay cut. “For how long?” asked Anne.
“Five or six weeks, tops.” Eddie gave a lopsided shrug they all knew meant I have no real idea.
Nate poked the tub of returned magazines and flyers with his toe. “These are going to fall really far behind,” he said. “I’m barely holding my own as it is.” He gave it another small kick and one of the bundles tipped over and fell into the hole he’d created in the middle of the crate.
Eddie stared at the tub. “Wow,” he said in his flat voice. “You’re kind of behind now. This tub showed up last Wednesday, didn’t it?”
Nate clenched his jaw. The worst part of the blossoming lecture was that, for once, it was well deserved. He’d barely done any work in the past couple of days.
And he was struck by how much Eddie’s flat delivery reminded him of his neighbor Andrew, the church-loving man who lived straight across from Tim, between timid Mandy and the mysterious door 23, which was not so mysterious anymore. It was just a cathedral-ceilinged room in the middle of an apartment building that wasn’t on the L.A. power grid.
Eddie wasn’t talking. He hadn’t been for a few moments. Nate’s brain shifted and he could feel the gears grind because he didn’t get the clutch down fast enough.
“Sorry,” he said, “my brain was somewhere else. Worried about finances now that I’m losing a day. What did you say?”
The heavy man wore his blank look. He stared at Nate for another moment, and Nate wondered if he’d just zoned off into the blank look. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Eddie popped back to life. “Why do you think you’re so far behind?”
“Well, I’m not that far behind.”
“I was pretty sure you’d have this done by now. It usually only takes you a day or two.”
Nate sighed. “It’s never taken me two days, Eddie. The quickest I’ve ever done one was three days, and that was because it was all magazines.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“I was pretty sure you’d done them in one or two days.”
“Never.”
Right on cue, Eddie put on his questioning face, like he suspected he was the victim of a scam. Nate saw it at least once every other month. He’d also seen it at the pizza place downstairs. Eddie didn’t believe they’d always served Pepsi, ne
ver Coca-Cola.
“Anyway,” Eddie said, “take tomorrow off, Nate. You want to have every Wednesday off?”
“I don’t suppose I could make it Monday or Friday?”
Eddie snorted. “Yeah,” he said, “like we’ll be giving you a month of three-day weekends.”
Twenty Four
Nate woke up Wednesday with nothing to do.
He thought about exploring some more, but snuffed the idea just as quickly. The cleaning crews were in. They swept and mopped the halls, cleaned the lounge, and dusted all the corners. Oskar walked from floor to floor and back, checking on each small team.
Nate considered continuing his study of online photos, but decided to go for a long walk. It seemed wrong to take his day off from staring at a computer screen and spend it staring at a computer screen. He pulled on his best sneakers, headed out the front gate, and walked north.
Most of the neighborhood’s architecture was from the sixties and seventies—low, wide apartment buildings with long balconies, all centered around a courtyard of some sort. It made him more aware of how old the Kavach Building was. He turned around and walked backward for a few steps. He was a little over a block from the building, but the bend in the street put it right in front of him. If he had a pair of binoculars he’d be able to look right through his own windows. Or Tim’s. He could even see the black windows of 14 peeking out above the Victorian next door.
He turned back and noticed the man across the street had a pair of high-end binoculars. Nate almost asked if he could use them when something clicked in his mind. The man was leaning against a green Taurus.
And he was pointing his binoculars at the Kavach building.
Nate’s mouth reacted before his brain did. “Hey,” he called out. “What are you doing?”
The binoculars came down and the man looked at Nate. His expression was like Eddie’s blank look, except this was the blank look’s mean, older, don’t-mess-with-me brother. The man tossed the binoculars through the Taurus’s open window and stared for a moment.