by David Chill
“You mean why is he living in a mansion north of Sunset, and I’m living here?”
“This place doesn’t seem that bad.”
“No,” she replied. “I suppose it’s not. But it’s all relative. So to speak. Phil ended up running my family’s business. He did a good job, he has a head for that sort of thing. I don’t. Never did, never will. I’m an artist, and I could never begin to make heads or tails out of a financial statement. But Phil pulled some nasty stuff when he was running the company. Not exactly illegal, but unethical as hell.”
I frowned. “Such as?”
“Phil set up a number of what my attorney called shell companies. They were partly designed to shield money from the IRS, but mostly designed to put that cash straight into Phil’s pockets. When we got divorced, around the same time we sold the company, there turned out to be a lot of cash missing. I hired forensic accountants to try and make sense of it all. They said it might take years to unravel everything, and the cost of doing this would be exorbitant. In the end we reached a settlement. We both walked away with a lot of money. He just got more of it than I did. It was as if he had it all planned.”
“That must have made you pretty mad. Your family’s business and all,” I pondered, watching her carefully.
“Of course it did. And after a few years in therapy, I’ve come to grips with it. I have it good, better than most. I live in the house I grew up in, I love my neighbors, and I’ve built a studio in the back. My daughter and I have had a falling out, but I’m close to my son. Life isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad now.”
“And it was bad before, because of the divorce…?”
“The divorce, sure. But even before that, the lying, the cheating, the running around with other women. My friends would tell me about it, but, well, I had two kids to raise, so I turned a blind eye. I shouldn’t have, but I did. You know, people envy you when you have money, but it doesn’t protect you from some very painful things in life. Then one day I said I’d had enough. I was just finished with the marriage. The kids were old enough to deal with their parents separating.”
“And that’s when you asked for a divorce.”
“I didn’t ask for anything, Mr. Burnside. I told him we were done, I told him what I thought of him, and I told him he’d be hearing from my attorney. He responded the only way men like Phil respond to conflict. With violence. After he hit me, he spent a week in jail, and it probably taught him a few things. It also taught me something about my daughter. Amanda largely stopped speaking to me. She couldn’t believe I would do that to her father.”
I took this in. “Was Phil violent with you before this?”
She looked out the window for a while, and responded without turning back to face me. It was almost as if I weren’t even there.
“Not with me. But Phil was a tough guy. He got into a lot of fights in college. If a guy started talking to me at a party, he would step in and give him the evil eye. He was a bully, I’m sure you knew about this part of Phil, you had to, I’m certain it didn’t start in college. Given his background, it wasn’t a surprise. In the beginning I liked the security of having someone strong near me. Over time, it became a burden. But through therapy, I also realized he is the way he is because of how he was raised. His father was one tough bastard. Phil’s behavior just mirrored his dad’s behavior.”
“One can easily surmise that,” I said, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“That is more true than you might imagine.”
“Interesting comment. What do you mean?”
“Ed lives in quite a nice house, up atop Culver Crest. It’s especially nice for a civil servant,” she said. “Maybe too nice.”
I had been wondering about this too, although I reminded myself that police officers get paid more than most government employees. They put their lives on the line, and there was always the grim realization that each day might be their last. It was not something cops thought about much, but it was a reality most had in the backs of their minds. The above-average pay helped justify their career choice, almost as much as wielding power over anyone who challenged them.
“You think there’s something unsavory going on with Phil’s father?” I asked.
“It always struck me as so. And, well, Phil has a lot in common with Ed,” she mused. “I’d say Ed taught him well, they both ended up with nice houses and big bank accounts, but I wouldn’t say either is living a happy life. You’ve met Phil’s new wife?”
“You mean Joy? Yes, I met wife number two today, in fact.”
“Actually Joy is wife number three. Number two lasted about a year. I don’t know how long he’ll be with Joy, but she’s cut from the same cloth as the last one. Young, pretty, and she has dollar signs in her eyes. Phil’s going to be spending a lot of his fortune on alimony. At least with me it was a cash settlement. We split and went our separate ways.”
“And how did the kids take all of this?” I asked.
She looked troubled. “Well, Aaron doesn’t like that his dad is hitting on a younger generation of women. Amanda is on better terms with them. Phil’s new wives are practically her peers. They’d go shopping together, go out for cocktails. It’s a little strange to me, to see the step-mom who’s only a couple of years older than my daughter, but welcome to our world.”
“This is interesting,” I admitted, although this line of inquiry didn’t seem to be getting me any closer to finding out what happened to Amanda Zeal, or where she might be. It did seem to be okay with Suzy Barber; she seemed oddly at peace talking about what could have been a difficult subject. Maybe a few years of therapy had really done some good.
“So, were you aware of Amanda’s relationship with an Anthony Machado?”
“You mean Moose,” she smirked. “I knew. I found out a few years ago, a friend’s mother told me. But she was in college by then, and technically an adult, so she could do what she wanted to do. I told her she was being foolish getting involved with a brute like that. She could do much better. But it was a strange relationship, they would see each other for a while, then stop, then start up again.”
“Why do you think she went out with him?”
“It’s like I said before, Mr. Burnside. There is something secure about being with a man who is physically strong. That’s something my daughter and I have in common. That, and we’ve made some poor choices in the men we’ve gotten involved with.”
*
Suzy Barber’s comment about Ed Zellis and his extra-nice house got me interested. I looked up his address and drove over to Culver Crest, a small hillside community overlooking much of the Westside, still technically part of Culver City. I parked on a narrow street in front of a home that might best be described as mid-century modern. This meant it was built in the 1950s, but it hadn’t been updated, and as such, it maintained the curious charm of being old but still fashionable. The home was long, with redwood siding on the exterior, and a sharply angled roof. When I was growing up, a house like this might have cost about a hundred thousand dollars, which was high-end in those days. Today, a home like this would sell for over two million.
I rang the doorbell and waited a minute until the low, muted shuffling sounds in the distance turned into louder, more noticeable shuffling sounds nearby. The door opened, and a ruddy looking man of about seventy years old faced me. His gray hair was cropped short, but he still had a lean, hard torso, and ice-blue eyes that likely didn’t miss much.
“Help you?” he barked.
“You’re Ed Zellis?” I started.
“Uh-huh. And you’re not.”
“The name’s Burnside,” I said, stifling a desire to shake my head, and handing him my private investigator card. No sense flashing my fake badge to an ex-cop. “We’ve actually met before. I went to high school with Phil. We played football together.”
“Burnside, Burnside,” he said, looking up at the sky, as if that would jog his memory. “Name doesn’t ring a bell, but okay, maybe you did. What
can I do you for?”
“Okay if I come in?”
“Nope. State your business here. Be quick about it, too.”
I looked at him. Ex-cops are not the most trusting of souls, and I really couldn’t blame them. There are plenty of scam artists around, and they often prey on the elderly, although I pitied any grafter who tried to con Ed Zellis out of his money. He appeared as if he could still handle himself well.
“Phil hired me to look into what happened to Amanda a couple of nights ago. I’d just like to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Something happened to my granddaughter? What’s that? She lose one of her diamond earrings at a Hollywood party?”
“No,” I said carefully, “a couple of guys tried to attack her and her boyfriend outside of her apartment in Beverly Hills. They didn’t do much damage, but Phil wants me to look into it.”
He glowered at me, looking incredulous. “What the hell’d my son hire you for? Should have gone to the cops or called me. I spent twenty years as a detective down in Largo. I was a real detective with a gold shield. He didn’t have to bring in some private joker like you.”
I sighed and took a look beyond him into the interior of his home. It was a nice home. It was the type of home that a doctor or lawyer or corporate executive might live in. It did not look like the home of a retired public servant, even one that worked down at Largo Beach, a large port city on the border of Orange County. But there had long been unsavory rumors about the Largo Beach Police Department. I started to give the rumors more credence.
“I spent thirteen years with the LAPD,” I said slowly. “Worked plainclothes for a long time, although I never got that gold shield. Maybe it was easier to get down in Largo. But now I’m out on my own. So I’m hardly a private joker. It’s not like I did tax returns before I hung out a shingle.”
“You were LAPD?” he squinted at me.
“I was.”
“What division?”
“Bunch of them. Mostly Broadway Division, down by 77th Street. Also worked vice up in North Hollywood. My captain there was Pete Bates. You may have heard of him, he’s Chief of Police now.”
Ed Zellis stared at me. “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of him. Know him, too. Better than you might think. Lives just over in Baldwin Hills. They call that the black Beverly Hills now. I call it something else.”
I didn’t bother to ask what Ed Zellis called it, and didn’t really want to know. Baldwin Hills was next to Culver Crest, and was like a number of nearby communities, including Fox Hills, Windsor Hills, and View Park. Previously all-white neighborhoods before the 1960s, the ethnic makeup rapidly changed when a few African-American families moved in. Many residents quickly put their homes up for sale, fled the area, gutted the property values, and helped bring the phrase “white flight” into our lexicon. In less than a decade, the demographics shifted dramatically. But now, these communities had completed a metamorphosis, changing from mostly white to mostly African-American, then to a regentrified mish-mosh that was something in-between.
“How do you know Chief Bates?” I asked.
“Played poker with him over the years. A few ex-cops get together, plus we got a former running back from UCLA and a couple of college football referees, too. It’s a good group, lots of stories, lots of laughs. Bates got invited one week, friend of a friend. Stayed on. Probably one of the few places he could just be himself, you know, public figure and all. I’ve made a lot of money off of him. Good police chief, but a lousy bluffer. Anyways, I know Pete ran North Hollywood back in the day, okay, you sound legit. If you’re not, I got a .44 in my pocket.”
“Thanks for the heads up.”
“Just letting you know. Well, you seem all right, so come on in,” he said as he opened the door. I walked into a neat and well-decorated home, if well-decorated also meant the style was stuck in the 1960s. The carpet was an orange shag, and the furniture was narrow and colorful. But the view would never go out of style. The far living room wall was all glass and provided a good glimpse of the L.A. basin. As I got closer, I noticed it was actually a great glimpse. You could spend an afternoon just staring out at that glimpse. I sat down on a burgundy recliner that creaked when I leaned back and was probably as old as the house. Like everything else here, except for Ed, it seemed to fit the motif remarkably well.
“Nice place,” I said. “Must have cost you a bundle.”
Zellis gave me a curious once-over. “Let’s just say I did well in the stock market.”
I nodded and took a glimpse out the window again. It was tough to take my eyes off of the view. Then Ed Zellis barked at me again.
“Tell me what happened to my granddaughter,” he demanded, taking a seat in a rocking chair across from me, but not bothering to rock. The chair seemed odd when someone was sitting in it without rocking, but everything seemed odd in here.
“Pair of guys jumped out of a van near her apartment building. They assaulted her and her boyfriend, Wyatt, although they fought them off. No money taken. But she may have been targeted.”
“Targeted, huh? More like that jackass boyfriend of hers was targeted. Never liked that guy. Worked for a movie studio. Never trusted those Hollywood types.”
“Your daughter works for the same employer,” I offered.
“That’s different,” he sneered.
“Why don’t you like her boyfriend? I mean, aside from him being in show biz and all.”
“He’s under investigation for some shady deals, he has a rap sheet. Guy’s a crook, I thought that from the beginning.”
I frowned. “How do you know he’s being investigated?”
Ed Zellis stared at me like I was an idiot. “I just told you I play poker with the chief. You ought to listen closer.”
“I ought to do a lot of things,” I pointed out. “So you asked the chief to look into Wyatt. As a favor?”
“Yeah. Sure. As a favor. I tried to warn Amanda, but kids, you know,” he said, his voice trailing off.
“You think this incident might have been related to her boyfriend, not her.”
“That’s where I’d start,” he said, his mouth curling. “If I was investigating this matter. Which I’m not. But I ought to be.”
“Anything more you can tell me about this Wyatt?”
“I’d check out his bank account. See if he’s made any recent purchases, like a new car. Renewed his passport. That kind of thing.”
I didn’t bother to respond. In addition to not working for the LAPD any more, there were only so many favors I could call in from friends like Juan Saavedra, and only so many tickets to Lakers’ games I could provide. Ed Zellis seemed to have forgotten neither of us still worked for police departments, and neither had access to any records. I thought of telling him what happened to Moose Machado this morning, and that Amanda might be missing. But there was something about Ed’s demeanor that told me he might not handle that information in a rational way.
“So,” I said, changing the subject for a moment. “How long have you been retired from Largo PD?”
“About ten years. Wound up being on the job almost thirty-five. I was the longest-serving cop. Except for the chief. Top brass always stays on a long time.”
“Long time,” I observed.
“Had an injury at the end. Messed up my hip. After a while, I figured it was time to hang ‘em up.”
“You figured that, or the department told you to go?”
Zellis continued to give me the once-over, although he seemed more defensive and less curious now. “Don’t you worry about how that played out. Bottom line is I served that community well. It was a better place because I was there.”
I didn’t see any point in arguing with him. And I knew certain police and fire departments had instituted what some called a deferred retirement program, mainly designed to allow veteran officers to stay on the job longer. Unfortunately, there was a component that also allowed officers to take extended leave due to job-related injuries. At full salary. So there were
a lot of aging cops who collected a paycheck without ever showing up to work. Some managed to game the system for years. One cop even claimed bad knees due to an on-the-job accident and then started a scuba-diving school while he was recuperating from surgery. I knew of a few LAPD officers who had abused the system, and when they were caught, they simply retired and began collecting a hefty pension. The program, like many others, started out with good intentions but quickly fell apart when unethical people found easy workarounds to game the system.
“So, you were a detective,” I said. “What’d you mostly work on?”
“Narcotics,” he said, with a measure of pride. “Port of Largo Beach is a major smuggling point. Lots of contraband coming through. Used to be mostly coke back in the day. Now it’s all sorts of things. None of them good.”
“You ever work vice?” I asked, wondering if we had anything in common.
“Yeah, but not for long. Hated it. Mostly dealing with perverts. I liked busting drug dealers. Drugs are the worst thing to ever be perpetrated on America. Everything bad that’s happened to this country, you can tie it back to drugs. Messes up lots of lives. At least I made a difference. Kept it out of the hands of some kids.”
“Okay,” I said, not entirely sure of where this was going, but at least Ed Zellis was talking to me. “What else can you tell me about Amanda? If it wasn’t about her boyfriend, is there any reason why anyone else would want to hurt her?”
Zellis shrugged. “Hard to say. Lots of crazy people in the world. Believe me, I’ve met a lot of them. They watch TV and think the person on the screen is talking to them. They aren’t. But go tell them that.”
“Okay. But you were on the job once. If you were looking for Amanda, where would you start?”
“I’d start with people close to her,” he said. “Not her parents, though. Maybe her little brother. It’s not hard to disappear into a college campus for a little while. All them kids look the same.”
*