“I don’t even know what that means,” I said, laughing. “Neither do you.”
It took all my restraint to not call the police at that very moment. But I resisted because I knew I would never hold up my end of the deal. Julie would get the money, all right, but she’d also get greeted by the cops as soon as Rebecca had been able to see her.
“Better do it fast,” I told her, and made a move for the door. “Rebecca’s having surgery on Thursday.”
A NEEDLESS EXCHANGE
Everything about the place said mid-tier hotel hoping to be something more: the valet loop and couldn’t-be-bothered attendants, the four-story atrium with glass-capped ceiling, the chain coffee shop, the potted palms and ivy-stuffed planters where hidden speakers pumped classical music into the echoing lobby. But something was off.
Hotels don’t have security guards. The gift shop was three times bigger than it needed to be. The few patrons milling about had no luggage. And the clearest signal that we weren’t where it seemed was the age of the front-desk receptionist. Pushing seventy, she was the last person you wanted greeting guests if your ultimate goal was to project a contemporary image. But she was perfect for the role she held.
She led us into a warmly decorated room where a hospital bureaucrat calmly walked Rebecca through a series of documents and legal disclaimers that indemnified the organization and staff from potential lawsuits. Neither side believed they prevented anything, but Rebecca signed them anyway.
She then made the handoff to an admittance nurse who outlined the process awaiting Rebecca. They adhered to a classic communication tactic for difficult situations: tell them what is about to happen, do it, then remind them of what just happened. There was comfort in believing you knew what was going on.
The admittance process then consisted of a series of check-ins with various nurses, each stage involving us going deeper into the core of the building, where the scrubs gradually changed color, the doors became more hospital-like, and all natural light disappeared. The one thing that didn’t change was the tone of the people we met along the way. Cheerful but impersonal, which I assumed was their way of coping. The old ones almost never looked Rebecca in the eye. They didn’t last this long by becoming too involved.
The final room was a holding pen of sorts where patients waited to be called into the pre-op room. Up until that point, there was a constant stream of questions and instructions and small tasks to distract from the real reason for the visit. But in this room all of that ended and the minutes dragged on in relative quiet. It was the ideal setting to dwell on the thing neither of us verbalized—the fact that Julie never showed.
Rebecca and I had spent the previous night pretending as if we weren’t waiting, but that’s exactly what we did. Any sound outside—the hollow drum from water dripping in the downspouts or my neighbors driving by on their way home—immediately pulled our attention away from whatever we were doing to give a hopeful glance outside. I even came up with a reason to leave the back slider unlocked and to disable the sensor lights around the house just in case someone wanted to visit us and preferred a shroud of secrecy.
But Julie never came.
The passing hours dimmed whatever chance we had that she would show. For no logical reason, I felt like I had let Rebecca down.
Rebecca finally accepted it wasn’t going to happen. “You going to start a fire?” she asked.
“You should really try to get some sleep,” I suggested.
She looked like she was going to pass out but she also lingered by the hearth like someone in need of something. I built a fire mostly out of kindling and sticks and one or two very small logs. It was the kind of preparation that made for a very brilliant but very fast burn. The room lit up almost instantly. We stood in front of the hearth and watched the yellow flames disappear high up into the flue.
Rebecca called it a night a few minutes later. The fire didn’t last much longer after that.
I decided to wait back in the main lobby. The room I was allowed to occupy just didn’t feel right. Filled with nervous spouses, nervous siblings, and in one instance, nervous parents, the room made me start to feel unworthy of the company it kept.
I ordered a coffee and sat on one of the handful of couches in the grand atrium. I put a call in to Badger to get an update.
“Where are you?” I asked. I had a hard time hearing him over the background noise.
“Out on the street,” he shouted. “Jerk-off valet wouldn’t let me hang in there with my car. Said I had to shut off my engine.”
Badger explained that his car had been acting up and it was better to keep it running because otherwise he was afraid he’d be unable to start it again. The fact that Badger even owned a car surprised me. I didn’t think he had the finances to afford one and instead did all his detective legwork using LA’s woeful public transportation system. Access to his own wheels somewhat diminished my respect for his bloodhounding. But I needed him and his car this time. Naively hoping Julie would show, I had him waiting outside the hospital with the money.
“Any sightings?” I asked.
“Haven’t seen her.”
“Okay, hang tight…” my words drifted as I hung up the phone.
I stared out the front at the line of cars in the valet loop. The drop-offs came in from the left and the pickups pooled on the right. And in between, one car was granted an exception.
The old-man Cadillac parked wherever the hell it wanted to.
“You like it?” asked the voice.
Arturo stood behind me and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Let’s go for a ride,” he suggested.
With one hand in his pocket on the gun I assumed was inside, there wasn’t much room for debate. As we walked out, I eyed the armed security guard manning the front entrance. I kept my gaze on him, waiting for eye contact so I could engage. I just needed an opening so I could alert him of Arturo carrying a firearm on the premises. But the man was interested only in monitoring passing women’s derrieres. Arturo guided me out.
“Hey bud,” he called out to the security guard and walked us over in his direction. “Where can we get a real coffee? Not this overpriced bullshit these guys are slinging!”
We lingered there for a minute while Arturo and the guard swapped jokes, then another minute while the guard thought of a place for us to go. Address in hand, Arturo went out front and slipped some bills to the valet captain. He looked back at me. I could easily have waved him off and headed back inside but everything seemed so casual. It was silly at best, bordering on outright rude, not to join him. So I jumped in the car.
“Do you trust that dope?” he asked, as we pulled out of the hospital complex.
My mind immediately raced. Unclear what dope he was referencing, I wanted to string him along to learn what I could.
“Probably don’t have a choice,” I replied vaguely.
“Huh?” he said. “We’ve passed five coffee shops already and he’s sending us to the boonies.”
I realized the dope Arturo referenced was a human being, the chatty security guard back at the hospital.
“Guy looked like he drinks his out of Styrofoam,” he said, laughing. “Probably a treat when he can get one of those flavored creamers. Daily Grind,” he said. “Never trust anyone who uses puns.”
Later, I understood what he was referring to but in the moment I had no idea what he was talking about. Arturo’s preferred communication style was the run-on sentence. He strung disparate thoughts together without the clear breaks needed to alert his listeners that he was on to a new topic. If visually represented, it would look like one single-spaced paragraph with no punctuation. Only when we had settled in at a shop near the community college did I realize the Daily Grind referred to the coffee shop recommended by the guard.
“Coffee shops are the new homeless hangout,” he said, gesturing to a disheveled man taking advantage of the shop’s free Wi-Fi. “Where’s the money?”
This time I was trac
king him. Despite Arturo counting the change just given to him by the barista, I knew what money he was actually talking about. But I pretended I didn’t.
“Which money?”
“My money,” he clarified. “Let’s sit over there. That guy stinks to high heaven,” he said, gesturing to the homeless man. We grabbed seats at a small table. “We’ll figure out a way to make it amicable. How bad is she?”
Arturo jumped from a potential resolution involving the money to a concern for Rebecca’s well-being.
“It’s pretty serious,” I said.
“Cancer?”
I nodded.
“That fucking disease.” He shook his head in frustration. “You been able to find her?”
I assumed the “her” was Julie but I wasn’t sure how much information I should give Arturo and tried to deflect.
“It hasn’t been easy,” I said.
“But you found her.”
“We spoke.”
“About?”
“What do you think?” I tried.
“When I think, I get into trouble,” he said. “Crazy, right?” He then called out to a newly arrived customer shaking the rain off her coat. “I thought Los Angeles was supposed to be a desert. She’s been hard to find,” he said back to me.
“Very hard.”
“I’ve been looking for twenty years. But you found her in a week. You seem like a smart guy, Chuck, but not that smart. Maybe she found you,” he pieced together. “Because you have something she wanted.”
Arturo’s claim that he wasn’t the thinking type wasn’t entirely accurate.
“You have the money,” he concluded. “Did you give it to her?”
“No,” I told him. “We made a deal. As of forty-five minutes ago she’s yet to keep her end of the bargain.”
“They been together a long time?” he asked. Arturo was trying to fill in the gaps about the other side of the bargain I had made with Julie for the money. He got to it quickly. “And she never showed. Typical.” Arturo found a moment of solace in his cup of coffee. “You ever been betrayed, Chuck?”
I thought of my ex-wife and the time leading up to our separation. As painful as it had been, it didn’t feel quite at the level to which Arturo’s question seemingly referred.
“I felt betrayed,” I answered, “but she didn’t betray me.”
“I’ve been betrayed. We had a lot of good times together,” he said, drifting. “You were probably too young to enjoy the eighties.”
“I was in high school. It was pretty fun.…”
“Really enjoy the eighties,” he appended. “Stupid fun. It was what it was,” he said with a shrug.
I sort of appreciated that he didn’t layer on a bunch of put-on remorse thirty years after the fact. I felt an acknowledgment that he screwed up and paid for it. But he spared me the self-flagellation you usually hear from the reformed. I had always thought the wallowing in past deeds was one part remorse and three parts reliving the good times.
“Maybe you give me the money,” he suggested.
“Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s mine.”
“You don’t want that money, it’s too dirty,” I said lamely.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’ll just get you in trouble again.”
“You know about me?” he asked.
“Some things.”
“I don’t care about the money, Chuck. I just want whatever’s going to lure that rat out.”
“She double-crossed you,” I said.
“I take back that part about you being smart. Those ears don’t work so good. Haven’t you been listening? Not double-crossed, betrayed.”
“I didn’t know there’s a difference.”
“You would if it happened to you.” Arturo rose from the table. “Let’s go back to the hospital and get that money.”
“It isn’t there,” I said, half-lying. It was there but not in my car.
“Sure it is. How else would you have paid your end of the bargain?”
This time Arturo was less accommodating. He made me walk out first while he followed close behind, in case I decided to make a break for it.
“You drive,” he said, tossing me the keys. “Put a scratch on this car and I’ll kill you.”
As we crossed the parking lot, I heard the squeal of tires and turned to see a battered truck bearing down on me. It looked like one of the thousands of unregistered little Japanese pickups in LA that serve as transportation for two-man landscaping businesses. I had to jump out of its way to avoid being crushed. The car slammed into Arturo’s Cadillac and shattered the fin taillight.
“Whoa!” Arturo cried.
The driver door swung open.
“Get in the car, Chuck!” Badger shouted.
Arturo was just now pulling his eyes from the crushed rear end of his true love. He made a move toward Badger, but was stopped by the gun pointed at his chest.
“Why is your landscaper pointing a gun at me?” Arturo asked.
“Do I look like I mow lawns?” Badger asked, annoyed.
“Hey, Badger,” I began, “this goes without saying”—which meant it really did need saying—“but let’s not do anything stupid.”
“Nothing stupid is going to happen because we’re getting out of here.”
“No one’s going anywhere,” Arturo announced, “until someone pays for this.”
I didn’t have any money on me and I knew Badger wouldn’t have any. We could have tapped into the millions in the bed of his truck, but that wasn’t a good idea.
“I’m sure insurance will cover this,” I suggested, but Badger shot me a look that told me maybe not.
“Work’s been a little slow,” he murmured, “had to make some discrete cuts.”
I assumed he meant “discretionary,” but how basic car insurance fit into that category escaped me.
I pulled out my cell.
“Who you calling?” Arturo asked.
“The police,” I said, “to get an accident report.”
It was a toss-up among the three of us who liked that idea the least. Badger could little afford a citation for operating without insurance. Arturo had a natural aversion to law enforcement and was not the type to involve them in anything if he could help it. And I didn’t need a long, drawn-out process—I needed to get back to the hospital to check in on Rebecca.
“Or I could pay for it,” I suggested.
Arturo caressed the taillight like it was a loyal hound heeling at his side while he mulled over the offer.
“You got the money on you?” he asked.
“No.”
He scoffed. But it was the least unpleasant of a long list of unappealing options, so he accepted it, reluctantly. We exchanged cell phone numbers even though he seemed fully capable of tracking me down in case I reneged.
“I’m going to break his neck,” he said at the end of the transaction, incapable of addressing the person who was the actual target of the threat.
Badger rightly pretended not to hear him.
My having to pay for the taillight was an unwelcome development, but at least the incident distracted Arturo enough to forget about his initial request. Almost.
“I’m going to need that other money, too” he said, as we parted ways.
Arturo still had a rat to catch.
OFF POINT
During one of the numerous stops before the surgery, Rebecca was asked to provide emergency contact numbers. Instinctively, she put down her home number and Julie’s cell number—then realized the issues with that.
“Should I put you down?” she had asked.
The right thing to do wasn’t the right thing at that moment.
“Leave it,” I said.
Her desire to believe was needed more than any kind of acceptance of the truth.
In the end, several irretrievable messages were left on an answering machine in an empty house and on a smashed cell phone in the bottom of a trash can some
where near Union Station.
I knew that Rebecca was dead even before the doctor came out to deliver the official message. I had returned to the hospital a few hours after she had gone into surgery and as I approached the desk in the waiting area, there was something in the young nurse’s eyes that told me it was over. She scurried off and returned a few minutes later with the doctor in tow.
He spoke about cardiac arrest, resuscitation attempts, and other procedures I only half-understood and half-heard. It was informational but not too clinical. He gave me a few moments to realize I didn’t have any questions for him before offering his condolences and returning to work.
It was a pitch-perfect, well-practiced delivery of a message straight out of the handbook, penned in equal measure by grief counselors and legal advisors. And I resented him for so easily and so faithfully sticking to the script.
“We left messages at the contact numbers you gave us,” the nurse explained once the doctor had left. She apparently felt the need to address why I had to hear about Rebecca’s death like this. “I even went out to the lobby but I couldn’t find you. I’m sorry,” she said, her voice quavering slightly and her eyes just barely starting to well up before her survival instinct kicked in and she steeled herself to return to work.
That brief display of compassion was enough to give me hope that not everything is a choreographed process to manage expectations. She had fallen prey to an actual emotion and temporarily went off script. That alone gave me enough strength to absorb what was to follow.
I met with another layer of hospital administration that you see only when tragedy strikes. No next of kin—outside of a wife who was officially dead but in reality a missing person—presented a bit of a quandary for the team. Having probably encountered every scenario over the years, this one was particularly troubling. They couldn’t release the body to me because I wasn’t named on the admittance form and had no documentation to prove I had any legal authority. It took an entire week to sort it out before I was able to hire a service to deal with Rebecca’s remains. Badger’s effort to find even a distant third cousin came up empty and in the end, they were granted to no one.
The Big Con Page 15