by David Chill
“You know I’m a private investigator now,” I started.
Cody took this in. “I heard. A while ago. Coach Cleary told me.”
“Yesterday I had a visitor,” I said, pointing to the photo I had just shown them. “Strange character, he wanted to pay me a lot of money to come down here and mostly do nothing. Suspicious only begins to describe his whole deal. After he left, I called someone I know at LAPD. Detective Rainey called me right after that.”
“What I still don’t get was why I wasn’t alerted,” he said.
“I tried to call you,” I pointed out. “Although I had no idea what was going to happen. So, even if I got through, there might have been no way to prepare for this.”
“But the police just let this happen?”
I sighed. “I wish I had an answer. This is how the LAPD wanted to handle it. This was their call. When I finally sensed what was happening, or about to happen, I tried to jump in and get you to at least hit the ground. I was too late.”
Cody got up and went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Corona. He walked with a slight limp. “You guys want one?”
“Yes,” we both said in unison.
He opened the bottles and brought them back to the table, holding all three in one large, oversized hand. “Sorry we don’t have any limes,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was being sardonic. The main reason to put limes in beer is to mask the taste.
I took a long pull. It tasted good. “Let me run a few things by you. It’s been a little over three years since we’ve last spoken, but I’ve stayed in touch with Johnny, and I’ve heard about your business venture. I guess you’re done with football.”
Cody shrugged. “I’ve been rehabbing, and I’m still thinking of taking one more shot, maybe next season. The Bears let me go, but I’ve gotten some interest from other teams. It would have to be next year. I know WAVE has the potential to be a lot more lucrative than the NFL. But there’s nothing quite like performing in front of sixty thousand screaming fans. It is the highest high there is. This place is cool, but performing on the field is like being on a drug.”
I understood. My own football career was cut short by an injury right after my college days ended, and back then they didn’t have the medical know-how to repair the body back to where it was almost new again. My NFL goals had disappeared, and I missed the cheers of the crowd, too. I also missed being part of a team, the camaraderie on the field and in the locker room. I missed out on making some big money, and while it was good back in the day, it was nothing like it is now. Back then, some players needed to take on off-season jobs; today, playing in the NFL is a year-round commitment.
“It must be hard to walk away from all that,” I remarked.
“Yeah,” he said. “And I also feel like I got a bad rap when I got waived. I’ve got something to prove.”
I frowned “Like what?”
“Right before my knee injury, I got labeled as having bad hands, which for a receiver, is like having no hands at all. I know it was preseason, and the game didn’t matter. But I had what should have been a good moment. The corner slipped, and I found myself wide open, fifteen yards beyond the coverage. The ball was thrown right at me, it was an easy touchdown, all I had to do was catch it. Just like I’ve done a million times.”
“And you dropped it,” I guessed.
“Yeah. Bounced right off of my hands and fell to the ground. I was waiting for the ball to reach me, and it felt like it was taking an eternity. I couldn’t just react. Suddenly, I felt the entire world was staring at me. You know, ever since I was drafted, I’d always been pegged as a special teams guy. I knew I could play receiver, but when you drop an easy pass like that, it just confirms what some people were saying.”
“Maybe you over-thought it,” I added. For a receiver, catching a football is indeed instinct. It is a reflex. The hardest catches to make are often the easy ones, when the player is wide open and has a few extra seconds to think about it. They start concentrating on not dropping the ball, which sometimes leads them to do just that.
“I know. And I was probably thinking about that drop a few minutes later when I caught a slant over the middle. The safety grabbed me and I tried to shake off the tackle; I honestly just wanted to make up for that dropped pass. But I couldn’t get out of his grasp, and I went down the wrong way.”
“That’s when you tore your ACL.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“And you want another shot. Just to prove something to the NFL. Or is it to prove something to yourself?”
Cody took this in. “Probably both. And I miss hanging out with the guys. The lifestyle was unreal. Everybody there had a lot of money, and everybody wanted to have fun. And the girls. Man, I thought being a football player at SC got me a lot of girls. But this was at another level. We called them jersey chasers. I felt like a rock star.”
“Understood,” I said but decided I needed to steer the conversation in another direction. “Is there anything going on within your company?”
“Sure. There are business issues,” he said, taking a swig of Corona. “But it’s no different from any other company, especially a startup. We had to let some employees go last month. They were naturally unhappy; it’s tough when people are down for the cause, work long hours, and then end up losing their jobs.”
“Any threats?”
Kristy jumped in. “Nothing overt,” she replied.
I frowned. “Meaning?”
“Well,” she said. “There was this guy, Zander Foley. He was our head of operations. Some of the scooters were disappearing. We had tracking devices on them, but they got disabled. We had reason to believe he was lifting them. He was let go.”
“Why did you suspect him?”
“We heard he was about to start a competitive firm,” she said. “We’ve been trying to get the scooters back, and a lawsuit’s been filed. I don’t like to think he’d stoop to something like this. Firing a gun, or even hiring someone to fire a gun.”
“Yes,” Cody said. “I can’t imagine Zander stooping to this level. This is business. It’s just about money. Numbers on a spreadsheet. Pieces of paper with presidents on it. It’s hard to believe someone would take action like that just over money.”
I disagreed but didn’t voice it. There are plenty of people who look at money as the be-all and end-all, not just columns of numbers or wads of bills, but a means toward power, prestige, and self-esteem. Sometimes it’s just a game, to see how much they can get. These people walk among us. I looked hard at Cody and Kristy and began to notice something, which was how different they looked. Cody maintained the image of a blue-eyed blond surfer, while Kristy had dark hair and dark eyes, and an olive complexion. It was unusual, but maybe not that unusual. One of my teammates at USC had flaming red hair and green eyes, something no one else in his family sported. He dismissed it as a recessive gene. Maybe this was true of the Groh family, too.
“All right,” I said. “Who else might have a grudge with you?”
Cody thought. “Zander may still have a few of his cronies working here. The thefts stopped, but I’ve noticed there’s been some grumbling in operations since he got terminated.”
“What does the operations department do around here?” I asked.
“Deploys the scooters and bikes,” Kristy said. “They end up in various locations around the city, a lot of them wind up near the bike paths by the beach. People rent them, and when they’re done, they just leave them where they finish their ride. Then someone else can rent them. That’s the beauty of this business. At the end of the day, we track where all of the units are. We hire contract workers that we call WAVE hunters. They go pick the scooters up, charge them, give them a cleaning if needed, and deposit them back on the streets. We have designated areas to place them, these are called the WAVE coves. But like I said, some of these scooters were disappearing. The tracking devices were being disabled, so we didn’t know where they were. At first, we thought they were being
chop-shopped. The batteries can be stripped out and sold for a quick buck.”
“Was there any security system on the scooters?”
“Yeah,” she said. “They would chirp if someone took them without authorization. But the scooters chirp so much, no one on the street pays attention anymore. Kind of like when a car alarm goes off. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s not being stolen, so people just ignore it. No one calls the police. But eventually, we figured all this out.”
“Doesn’t sound like a job for a lone wolf,” I observed. “This Zander must have had some help.”
“Yeah, in fact, that’s how we caught him,” Cody said. “We staked out a few places, saw someone unaffiliated with the company taking them and loading them into a van. The cops arrested him, and he gave up Zander.”
“Was Zander arrested?”
“He was questioned, but not charged,” he sighed. “No hard proof tying him back to the thefts. His word against theirs. But I don’t know why they would bring Zander’s name up if he wasn’t a part of this scheme. We’re working on it with the City Attorney’s office, but so far they say they don’t have enough hard evidence. I’m a little frustrated with law enforcement right now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Anyone else inside the company you’re looking at?”
“Not really,” he sighed. “We’re at a dead end now.”
I looked around. “You’ve built quite an operation here. This is impressive.”
“Yeah, and I’d like to keep it that way,” he said and looked over at the door where the detectives had exited. He thought hard for a moment. “Look, Coach, I’d like to find out more, find out if anyone at the company was involved in what happened tonight. But, hey, there’s only so much I can do. I need someone to take a deep look into this. You said you do private investigations. Can I hire you to look into things here?”
“Okay,” I said a little cautiously. “But you have to understand something. I’ll be prying into both your business and your private life. I go where the investigation leads me.”
Cody nodded. “I get it. Do what you got to do. I want to know what’s going on here. I just want this stuff over with.”
“Fine,” I said. “But there’s one other thing I have to tell you. I’m a little pricey.”
“Not a problem,” he shrugged and raised his arms. “As you can see, I’ve got resources. When can you start?”
I took another swig of beer. “I already have.”
*
Cody asked that I come in and meet with his HR director, Bernadette Green, the next day to iron out the details of how I would investigate WAVE. I went back outside for a little while, standing around in the warm night air, waiting for Rainey to finish whatever it was he was doing. I looked at the small round holes above the entranceway again and watched for a few minutes as the ballistics team carefully dug through the stucco. I asked Rainey if they had any results back on Mr. Stoner from the facial recognition scan, and he shook his head no. I handed him the bag with the four hundred dollars that Stoner had given me, told him what happened, and made sure I did it with a uniformed officer a few feet away. Rainey looked at it and asked about the rest of the money. When I said that was all there was, he shook his head, muttered something about all PIs being alike, and walked away. I took that as a sign I could leave. No one tried to stop me.
On the way home, I took a small detour and drove down Lincoln Boulevard to the nearby Loyola Marymount campus. The college was situated up on a hill and had a nice view. It was a clear evening with a near-full moon, and the spot provided a breathtaking view of the city. The Los Angeles basin at night was bright and shimmering, and the sea of lights twinkling below me was a reminder of just how beautiful the region could be at times. But L.A. always looked best when it was dark out, and it always looked best when viewed from a distance.
Gail and Marcus were asleep when I got home, and they were gone when I woke up. I made some coffee and ate a bowl of peanut butter granola. Gail had purchased the granola to try and lure Marcus away from the Frosted Flakes he insisted I buy during one of our recent expeditions to the supermarket together. When faced with a binary choice of purchasing a sugar-laden treat or dealing with a five-year-old having a public meltdown, the treat usually wins. I read the local news, and there was nothing about a shooting in Playa Vista, nor about anything else interesting. I looked forward to football season starting soon. I did not look forward to what I was about to do next.
I arrived for my appointment with Dr. Rosenbloom a few minutes before 10:00. Her office was on Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, on the third floor of a small, four-story office building. The hallways were lined with soft, dark green carpeting that had square-patterned designs. A quiet placidity embodied the space, and the silence felt downright eerie as I walked along the hall. For a moment, I thought I could almost hear my own heartbeat.
I sat in the waiting room for a few minutes, and at exactly 10:00, the door opened. A short, trim, well-groomed woman in her early fifties walked out. She had brown hair that fell in waves halfway down her back, and she was nicely dressed in a burgundy pantsuit with a silver chain around her neck. She wore a pair of silver-framed eyeglasses that in addition to making her look more intelligent, oddly, also made her look more attractive.
“Mr. Burnside?”
I stood up. “That’s me.”
“I’m Dr. Rosenbloom,” she said with a smile, and we shook hands. I handed her some paperwork. She led me into her office, which was a small, tastefully decorated room, containing a desk and two soft black leather chairs that faced each other. A couple of framed photographs of sunsets lined the walls. Maybe they were sunrises. I couldn’t tell.
“So,” she said, her smile still on her face as we settled in. “What brings you here today?”
I thought of saying my two-year-old Pathfinder but wasn’t certain she would appreciate the humor. “I’m here because my wife asked me to come.”
She looked down at the paperwork. “It says here you have a court order to seek counseling for anger management.”
“Well, that, too.”
“All right. But let me understand something. What do you want to get out of therapy? Aside from fulfilling this directive from the judge. And making your wife happy.”
I stopped and realized I hadn’t given this issue much consideration. I thought for a long moment. Dr. Rosenbloom waited patiently. “I want you to tell me I’m sane and that the rest of the world has gone crazy,” I finally said.
It was her turn to think for a long moment. Finally, she spoke. “Is that what you truly believe? That the rest of the world is crazy?”
“Somewhat,” I answered. “I do what I think is right. Not everyone buys into that.”
“What makes you say the world has gone crazy?”
I took a breath. “I’ve spent a lot of my life dealing with society’s problems. I work ostensibly in law enforcement. My job has always been to stabilize unstable situations. As a police officer, I had to enforce laws I didn’t always believe in. Help people that don’t always deserve the help. I still do that, but at least the pay is better.”
“Law enforcement,” she repeated. “That can be a noble career.”
“Not the way I practice it.”
She looked at me oddly. “How do you feel about your career choices?”
“Generally, okay,” I said. “I try and make the world a better place, although things don’t always work out as planned. But I’d rather do this than be cooped up in an office all day.”
She took off her glasses and wiped them with a piece of beige cloth. It might have been for a dramatic pause. It might have been they simply needed cleaning. She put them back on. “Before we go any further, let me ask you something. Do you believe you’re in need of therapy?”
“No.”
She looked at me and then back at the paperwork some more. The smile was now officially gone from her face. “Why don’t you describe for me the incident that happened. The on
e that brought you into court.”
“It was a few months ago,” I started. “We had gone to a kids’ birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, and I was walking to the car with my son, Marcus. He’s five. There was a line of people waiting to get in, mostly kids and parents we walked past. One of the kids there pushed my son for no reason. My son pushed back. Before I could intercede, the other kid’s father grabbed Marcus to break it up, and he grabbed him too roughly. I don’t remember much after that, other than morphing into caveman mode and punching the other dad in the face a couple of times. I also got into it with two other men who joined the fray. Things got out of hand.”
“It says here you beat up three men.”
“I suppose I did.”
“Have you gotten into physical altercations before?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Yes. I used to work as an LAPD officer. Now I’m a private investigator. My job involves dealing with undesirables. Sometimes they don’t respond well to verbal acuity.”
“I see,” she said. “Do you think you could have done anything different in this recent situation?”
I sighed and agreed. “I could have done what we tell our son to do. Use words. I could have raised my voice. Had I done so, things would have probably ended differently. I don’t think it would have gone beyond some hooting and hollering.”
“Do you wish you had done that?” she asked.
“I wish I hadn’t been in that situation at all. I wish that other kid had behaved himself. I wish that the other dad had acted differently in trying to break up what was a very minor scuffle. But, yeah. I put Marcus in harm’s way, and I regret that. I lost my temper when I saw that guy grab him.”
“I see the other man brought legal action against you.”