Done for a Dime

by David Corbett

  Soon, the whole issue of a green card became moot. Everything went haywire when he returned to Chicago. He had to flee—two unforeseen benefits of his undercover work: new friends south of the border and a master class in phony documents. He told Marisela he’d left the force to do private security work of a decidedly sub rosa type for rich men and that explained his need to slip back and forth across the border twice yearly for longer and longer periods. Since he brought back dollars, no one second-guessed him, not openly. Besides, it was the truth, more or less. And Marisela’s family had secrets of its own.

  It turned out Ovidio, Marisela’s brother-in-law, had friends not only among the former thugs in the National Guard and Treasury Police but within La Mara Dieciocho as well, a bunch of gangbangers deported from East Los Angeles, specializing in the usual: stolen cars, weapons, shakedowns, drugs. So Ovidio had no problem turning a blind eye to the secretive comings and goings of Marisela’s American marinovio. On the contrary, a mutually beneficial arrangement was forged. Thus the ability to ask for a boat at a moment’s notice and trust one would appear. For a price.

  Before leaving the office complex, Ferry collected Manny’s .357. He reloaded the revolver, keeping the spent casings and putting them back in the box of extra shells, storing it all in the van’s glove box, being careful to wipe away prints.

  He drove into Rio Mirada, heading for Baymont, wanting to reconnoiter the scene once more before meeting with the big fella. Once he got to the hill and started up the incline through the winding, cluttered streets, he took heart from what he saw. Rainwater from the recent storm sat backed up in the sewers. They had infiltration problems up here, the storm drains and sewer lines decaying underground and their runoffs flowing into one another. That, plus the jerry-rigged addons, the bathrooms linked illegally to storm drains, not sewer lines; roof leaders linked backward the other way; cracked service laterals, leaking sewer lids, and rusted cleanouts. It meant every home up here was vulnerable to storm drain fumes rising up through their sewer lines.

  It wasn’t the hillside’s lone vulnerability. The high foreclosure rate up here had created about a dozen vacant houses. Most lenders liked work-outs with defaulting borrowers, given the hassles of flipping the lots. Frontline Financial, the most aggressive subprime lender in the area, had a different plan. Targeting borrowers with nosediving credit, they jacked them into impossible loans, drove them into foreclosure, then either planted dummy bidders at the trustee sales to drive up the prices or slipped them off auction and back-channeled the sales to insiders or others willing to kick back for the privilege.

  These were the houses Ferry had targeted. The past two weeks, he’d gone around, jimmying the locks, making sure he could get inside at his pleasure, testing to see if or when someone might come around, make repairs. There were eight houses that had stayed good, spaced pretty well evenly around the hill.

  He checked each one again on his way up to the top. No change, easy in, easy out. No squatters or druggies to deal with. He tooled around inside each one for a few minutes, to make it look like he had real business, before heading back out to the van and continuing on.

  Near the top, he came upon a testing crew running smoke into the storm drains. Three guys in hard hats and coveralls watched with dismal expressions as, sure enough, plumes rose up from the sewer lids. Ferry slowed the truck, hailed the nearest man in the crew.

  “What’s all this?”

  The guy put his hands on his hips, eyeing the plumbing company logo on the side of Ferry’s van, then offering a thin smile. “Tunnel system up here’s just totally screwed.” He made three separate gestures of resigned disgust. “You got cross-connections all along here botching up both lines, half-ass laterals from the old federal housing, inflow leaks, drain tap-ins way outta code—”

  “Figured something must’ve gone seriously haywire, you guys out here on a Sunday.”

  “We’ve been out here Sundays—hell, Saturdays, holidays, goddamn Christmas Eve—since I can’t remember.”

  “How long you think till the storm drains clear?”

  The guy just laughed. “What they ought to do? Huff and puff and blow this whole damn hill down. Pay people off, start over. You know?”

  Yes, I do, Ferry thought, easing his foot off the brake and waving good-bye.

  The very top of the hill rose up beyond the last houses, forming a bluff that created a shallow box canyon. Beyond it, the hill gave way to a sloping meadow once home to quicksilver mines, now cluttered with old red rock tailings and thick with star thistle and field mustard.

  Ferry looked back the way he’d come. You had houses built on piers into the hillside, which provided just the right ventilation. Cheap single-pane windows that would shatter with the temperature differential, creating even more ventilation and amping radiant heat. Wood shake roofs with dried-out, curling shingles—airborne embers could embed themselves there. Years of ladder fuel accumulation, shaggy brush and vines and overgrowth nudged tight against houses and trailing across the roofs. Pine duff inches thick in places, at the bottom of which embers could burn unnoticed for hours, days, weeks, even after the top layers got hosed down.

  Add to all that the bottleneck at the bottom of the hill—one way in for the engine crews, same way out for the evacuees—and the fact that fire races uphill, the only thing you could ask for to better the situation was two months’ more time, until the Santa Ana winds of April kicked in.

  And of course, the coup de grâce—the hydrant couplings were World War II vintage. Two and a half inches. Nearly every fire company for miles around had upgraded to three-inch. Their hoses wouldn’t fit. Rio Mirada would have to rely on its own four pumper crews to fight the blaze and whatever CDF could drop from the sky.

  Before driving back down the hill, he made a pass through the uppermost neighborhood—Home in the Sky, they called it. His point of interest was the little mom-and-pop filling station and food market at the very top. A boon to the locals, walking distance for kids and old folks. And people up here were loyal. Despite higher prices, folks bought their gas here. Every two weeks the owner phoned in his order, and every other Saturday night the tanker wound its way up the hill.

  Ferry drove past the pump island, like he meant to turn around, in reality checking to see if the owner’d put up the sign that they were out of gas. Sure enough, third pump, unleaded. OUT OF SERVICE. It wasn’t just luck. Luck was for the unprepared. When you’re ready, it’s fate.

  For good measure, he checked across the panhandle, to see what was up with the Victorian where Manny’d been crashing. Once he got there, all the good fortune he’d just tallied up in Baymont seemed stolen back again. Squad cars lined the street. He saw cops gathered around the Victorian’s yard, they were searching it high and low. The rust-haired detective with the sad-bag eyes was there, too. Murchison. Ferry wondered how much they knew about Manny, whether an APB had been radioed out, full name and description and criminal record.

  It all seemed to be happening at hyperspeed, good luck and bad. He wished he knew what that meant. Regardless, it was time to bring the big guy on board.

  Ferry drove past the warehouse district and down to the riverbed to a place called the Slaughter House. The card room, named for a spit of land near where it sat, had opened during World War II, same time as the brothels and bars along the Little Liberty boardwalk, a wartime gambling haven for servicemen and the shipyard crews.

  The current owner was trying to clean up the place—put in a restaurant, a conference room, a sports bar—but Ferry had hired himself out to a few card rooms in one of his first stints back in the States after fleeing Chicago. He knew the scams reasonably well, and his first time here, he’d gleaned from a railbird’s bragging that he’d been placing sports bets through a phone spot and getting his payoffs out of a bogus player bank.

  Ferry walked in and saw Asians and Filipinos already thronged around the Pan Gow and Pan Nine tables. Sucker games. Across the room, the rest of the local rube
s played Texas Hold ’Em and Lowball, two-dollar ante, four-dollar raise; it was impossible, no matter how good your luck, to so much as break even given the pots involved. Table fees ate up your winnings, not to mention management’s propensity to advance the clock. At one of the tables, Ferry spotted a guy he pegged for a prop player, a cardsharp employed by the house for rough play on fools and drunks.

  Ferry moved through to the sports bar. It was a different world in here. In addition to the half-dozen TVs mounted around the room, there were also windows looking out at the sunlit river. A small marina lay right out back, another recent upgrade, and the local honchos liked mooring their boats there, to show what characters they were. It made the Slaughter House a sort of unofficial yacht club for candy-ass degenerates.

  At the bar’s far end stood the conference room. Acting as though he didn’t know where he was going, Ferry opened the door and poked halfway in, did a double take when he heard voices, glanced up and around the room, then mumbled an apology, and closed the door again.

  They were all in there.

  Clint Bratcher, the big fella, Ferry’s paymaster, held court. At his side sat his prime pick for city council in the upcoming special election, Ralston Polhemus—insurance broker, respected in his community, a big shot at Mission Baptist. Like everyone else in Bratcher’s pen, Polhemus sold his allegiance up front. Bratcher arranged the money.

  Polhemus was needed as the swing vote in an upcoming eminent domain push Bratcher had masterminded. Polhemus was expected to provide cover for city staff working the deal, and Bratcher needed his vote to approve the debt and forestall any challenges to tax diversions or bond terms. He was running against the school board president, Sheila Hampton-Dawes, also African American but tied to the affordable housing clique through her brother.

  It was Bratcher’s job to keep Hampton-Dawes off the council and, more important, deny her the seat on the board of the redevelopment agency that came with it. It was Bratcher’s special notoriety, not so much his power to elect, but his power to defeat. His attack ads were legend. The ones focused on Hampton-Dawes detailed her attempts to get permits revoked on all the development projects around town—projects stalled by the dot-com bust and the subsequent lending squeeze—and to have those permits secretly reissued to her brother or his friends.

  “Biggest racket in the world,” Bratcher told anyone who’d listen. “Affordable housing. And the phony nonprofits pushing it.”

  Beside Polhemus sat Walter Glenn, a local architect and contractor best known for expediting building permits, for himself and select others. You hired Glenn as a consultant for your project or watched it get snarled in red tape and die.

  Beside Glenn sat Bob Craugh, a developer and redevelopment honcho who, along with four other landowners in Rio Mirada, decided what got built, what didn’t, in town. Not a mitigation plan or review process devised by man he couldn’t humble. There were six strip malls in town with over 40 percent vacancy that Craugh had pushed through the redevelopment agency, every one funded by bonds secured by projected increases in tax revenue that never materialized—a sweet deal, since the city, not Craugh, held the debt. But now he had three work sites idle in town, faced permit cancellation, and was accused of land banking. Thus the sit-down with Bratcher. They’d teamed up before, together with Glenn, during the last election cycle.

  The others around the table Ferry hadn’t recognized. But that wasn’t the point. He’d caught Bratcher’s eye, and now it was time to wait.

  He took a stool at the bar, ordered coffee, and watched the basketball game on an overhead TV. In time, the conference room door opened, a brief surge in noise, the voices within competing for an instant with the ball game commentary, then dying again as the door closed. Bratcher came forward—a large man, six-four, two forty, with squarish, clean-shaven features marred by pocky cheeks and a broken nose. He had meaty arms, thick hands, hard blue eyes. He dyed his hair and combed it neat as a colonel.

  “Who’s on top?” Bratcher directed the question at the bartender. He didn’t so much as glance sidelong at Ferry.

  The bartender, adding egg whites to a gallon jar of Collins mix, glanced up at first Bratcher, then at the screen. “No clue.” He shrugged. “Haven’t paid much attention.”

  “Game’s over, all intents and purposes.” Ferry slipped off his stool and tossed a couple singles onto the bar. “Might as well catch some fish.”

  “You got a favorite spot?” It was Bratcher. Like they were strangers. But the eyes were cold. He was ticked.

  “I’m open to ideas.”

  “Try Dutton’s Landing, across from Cuttings Wharf. End of Green Island Road. Some late-run salmon and steelhead can still be had, and there’s always stripers. Even if you don’t catch anything, nice just to be out there. Might spot some gadwalls or mallards starting north. Kinda early in the year, but warm as the weather’s been, who knows?”

  Listen to you, Ferry thought. A real hook and bullet guy.

  15

  Toby parked at the curb outside a stately Mission-style home on the edge of downtown. A low stucco wall, rimmed with red clay tiles to match the roof on the house, surrounded the yard, which was filled with massive oaks and smaller chinaberry trees.

  Getting out from behind the wheel, he collected from the backseat his father’s horn and his own. He felt oddly protective of the baritone, almost paranoid. Its weight in his hand seemed oddly personal. This was the one part of his father’s life he understood—devotion, practice, ambition, disappointment. He wanted the horn near him. If it got damaged somehow or lost, it’d feel like he’d killed the old man all over again.

  He joined Nadya on the sidewalk as she pushed open the ironwork gate. Side by side, they walked up a curving brick path beneath the trees, sunlight dappling the ground through the oak leaves, which rustled in a midday wind. Climbing the steps to an arcaded porch, they found a brass nameplate beside the front door: CHRISTINA NAVIGATO, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW.

  Toby prepared to ring the bell but then noticed the door stood slightly ajar. He glanced at Nadya, who shrugged. It was an office, after all, not just a home, Sunday notwithstanding. He nudged the door open.

  “Hello?”

  Two large rooms with coved ceilings flanked the entryway, one for waiting, the other a conference area lined with bookshelves. Both were empty, as were the small offices lining the hallway. At the rear, the hallway zagged. A rustic kitchen stood to one side. Toby heard voices, then saw, at the very back, a carpeted stairway leading to the second floor. He turned to Nadya, shrugged—she answered back with a shrug of her own—and led the way up.

  Just beyond the landing stood an archway leading to a large, recessed, wood-paneled library with a low ceiling, lit by skylights above, antique sconces along the walls, and Tiffany table lamps elsewhere. A dense oak table dominated the center of the room, piled high with case files, pleadings, three-ring binders, and document boxes.

  Four people sat around the table—Tina, two other women, and a man. Atop their heads they wore blue-and-white FedEx envelopes, pulled down to the eyes or pushed back to the crown—all of them laughing giddily, like kids at a birthday party.

  “Hello?” Toby said again, Nadya behind him in the archway.

  The laughter stopped in halting chirps; everyone turned. “Oops,” someone whispered.

  Tina rose, pulled the FedEx envelope off her head, and eased forward, smiling sheepishly. “It’s Sunday,” she explained. “We’re here working, instead of at home. Needed a little boost.” She held the envelope up, to demonstrate. “Rally hats.”

  Introductions ensued. The man was Tina’s brother, Dan, who dominated the room the instant he stood up. One of the women, Shel, was his wife, a reedy woman with graying red hair. Something haunted her eyes, Toby thought, and in that regard they reminded him a little of Nadya’s—inviting but uneasy, too. She did not stand; a cane was hooked to the back of her chair.

  Tina introduced the last woman as her partner—bespectacled and prim,
a thirtyish Filipina with dimples and a pageboy haircut. Joyanne was her name. Toby wondered, Partner in love or law? Taking her small hand, he remembered there’d been only one name on the door. But earlier, when Tina’d mentioned her male mentor, he’d inferred they’d been lovers. Now this. Maybe I got it wrong, he thought. Maybe I’ve got everything wrong.

  He put the horn cases down. “Nadya can fill you in on what just happened at the house. You’ll want to know. In the meantime, I need to make a phone call. Is there somewhere private?”

  Tina led him to a small office just off the landing, with little in it but a single desk, a lamp, and a telephone console. As soon as she left, he closed the door, selected an outside line, and phoned the number he knew from memory. A frail voice answered.

  “Miss Carvela? This is Toby Marchand.”

  On the other end of the line he heard a faint gasp, like she’d nicked herself with a pin. “My poor boy, I am so sorry, so terribly sorry.”

  At the sound of her voice, the feelings came. He bit his cheeks. “I have an apology to make.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “The police.”

  “They were here. Earlier.”

  “Yes, I know, Miss Carvela. I was the one who told them where to come.”

  The line went still. Toby filled the silence with recriminations.

  Finally, she said, “Oh, in the history of such things, it was hardly too bad.” The cheerfulness seemed forced.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Francis—”

  “He’s fine, dear. He’s found a place with some friends. I suppose I can tell you that. He asked me not to tell you where. For your sake, not just his.”