Jet Sweep

by David Chill

  “All right,” I said. “Just what do you think was going on with Zander? Why do you think he was let go?”

  “The word was that he was stealing scooters. I couldn’t believe it, it made no sense. They said he was going to start his own scooter company, but hey, I’ve known Zander for a while, and he never ever said anything like that. Never even implied it. I would have known.”

  “Then why do you think he was he let go?”

  Kuykendall paused. “I don’t think Zander bought into everything here. I think he saw there were shortcomings in the business model. We’ve never turned a profit, don’t even have one forecasted for years, and Zander was thinking we might never get there.”

  “And …”

  “And to work here, you’ve got to be all in. They use this expression, down for the cause. It means you have to work very hard, but I think Zander didn’t see a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He’s a little older, and I think he was a little frustrated. For me, it isn’t a big deal, it’s my first job. If WAVE goes under, I’ll just get another job.”

  “But for Zander this was different.”

  “Yeah. Look, this is good experience for me, but for a guy like Zander, he’s worked for a bunch of startups that went nowhere. I guess he started getting tired of all this.”

  “You know how I can reach Zander?” I asked.

  Rob Kuykendall pulled out his phone. “Sure,” he said, either not aware, or more likely not caring about the company’s privacy policy. Maybe it was just Bernadette Green’s policy. “Here’s his address and phone number.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You want his email, too?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. Why not.”

  Chapter 7

  It was fortunate for me that Zander Foley not only lived a few short blocks from WAVE but that he was also at home when I rang his doorbell. Being unemployed gives you the freedom to do whatever you want to do and go wherever you want to go. But it also affords you the right to do nothing at all, and to sleep in as late as you want. Zander looked a little groggy, the way we all look when we stumble out of bed without having sufficient time to orient oneself to the impending day. Zander was dressed in a wrinkled t-shirt and red-plaid boxers when he opened the door, his hair mussed, and he blinked more times than I cared to count.

  “Zander Foley?” I asked.

  “Yeah, uh-huh,” he said, trying to focus on me. “Do I have a package or something?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t work for FedEx,” I said, flashing my PI license and wishing I still had my shiny fake badge, the one that made people think I was a police detective. My last badge was confiscated by a real-life detective from the Culver City PD, who’d admonished me that continuing this practice would lead to being arrested, charged, and prosecuted for impersonating a police officer. This wasn’t Culver City, and Gary Adler wasn’t looking over my shoulder, but his authoritative voice still rang in my ear.

  “The name’s Burnside. I’m a private investigator, and I’m looking into the shooting that happened at WAVE the other night. You’re aware of it?”

  It took him a second or two for this piece of information to resonate. “Yeah. I did hear about that. So what?”

  His casualness about what might have been a capital crime was a little surprising. I decided to see if something else might surprise him. “Did you hear that Kristy Groh was killed last night? Down in San Pedro?”

  His eyes widened. “No. Wow,” he said, his mouth gaping, seemingly horrified. Some good actors in L.A. can pretend to be shocked and pull it off, as could some world-class sociopaths who don’t even have to pretend. But there was something in Zander’s expression that made me sense he was legitimately unaware.

  “Her car went over a cliff,” I said. “It looked bad.”

  “Had no idea,” he said, his mouth still wide open.

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  He stepped back. I walked into a small, carpeted living room that had a couch and a coffee table, and not much more. There was a small dining room table set off next to the kitchen, and it held a laptop and two empty cans of Coors Light that were both crumpled in the middle. He excused himself and came back a minute later wearing a pair of jeans. I sat down at the table and glanced at the laptop. It was open to a job-listing website.

  “Looks like you could use a cup of coffee,” I started.

  “I could use a lot of things,” he said. “But what happened to Kristy?”

  “The police are investigating as we speak,” I replied, not wanting to give away too many details, vaguely wondering how Detective Rainey would view my inserting myself into a criminal investigation.

  “Was it an accident?” he asked.

  I shrugged and wondered why he brought that up. “Might have been an accident, might have been something more. You think there could be foul play involved?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Anything’s possible. Who would have thought electric scooters would be this tough a business.”

  “A tough business?” I repeated. I thought of the football world, and my sense was that scooters were fairly tame by comparison.

  “No,” he said and paused to think. “It’s an easy business to get into, but it’s a tough business to become good at.”

  Something puzzled me. “Why did you immediately think of the scooter business? You think Kristy’s death might have been business-related?”

  His eyes flickered for a second. “No. I mean, I don’t know. I’m not sure why I went there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How well did you know Kristy?”

  “Pretty well,” he said, stifling a yawn. “We were at the same level at WAVE, and kind of in the same situation.”

  “How so?’

  “We’re both in senior management, but we didn’t have a lot of power. She’s on the board, but it’s mostly an honorary position. The three founders call the shots. They’ve made mistakes. Both Kristy and I were frustrated. These three guys don’t have any real experience in business, they’re just ex-jocks that were friends since kindergarten. They got an idea, had access to money, and so they’re in charge.”

  “You and Kristy talk about your frustration?”

  He shrugged, got up, and walked into the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator, he looked inside and pulled out a can of Red Bull. He opened it and took a gulp. He didn’t offer me one, which was fine. Coffee was my drug of choice.

  “We were trying to give them guidance, but they have a real level of arrogance. They weren’t listening. It got complicated because Cody and Kristy are brother and sister, although you would hardly know it. They never struck me as real close. Kristy thought that Cody was using her for her engineering background, only to get the company up and running. Now that things are in motion, she was afraid they were going to dump her.”

  I frowned. “You think Cody would fire his own sister?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know for certain,” he said. “They were having a lot of late-night sessions at the office, after a lot of the staff left, trying to work things out.”

  “I want to get back to something,” I said, watching him carefully. “You mentioned this was a tough business. How so?”

  He thought for a moment. “Look, there are two paths here. Once you grow the business to a certain point, you either go public with it, and the stock shoots up in value. Or you get acquired by a larger company, like a Google or a Microsoft. Either way, you get a boatload of money. But there’s a lot of work that goes into getting the business to that place. I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen at WAVE. That’s partly what I meant by it being a tough business. I mean startups. And I think maybe everyone there’s starting to realize that.

  “Sure,” I said, feeling curious about an area in which I knew very little. “What do you think needed to be done at WAVE?”

  “Founders need to take it seriously, lay out a real strategic plan, not the one they used to dazzle investors. One that has an actual path to profita
bility. Cody and his buddies, they were talking about expanding all over the country, even all over the world. No reason they couldn’t, but they needed to get it right in L.A. first, or at least get it right somewhere. L.A.’s a tough market. I told them to try someplace smaller, a better test market, but they were convinced L.A. adapted to trends faster. They liked to say if you can make it in L.A., you can make it anywhere. But whatever, they needed to show that this business model had viability before expanding.”

  “You think this business model is viable?”

  Zander looked away and thought for a minute. “It’s an easy model to copy. Just look at how quickly WAVE got started. They found out about Night Hawk in Chicago, and figured they could do the same thing in L.A. But if they can enter the market this easily, so can anyone. And what that means is bigger companies, those that are better capitalized and more organized can come in, cut prices, promote themselves, and dominate the market.”

  I took this in. “Sounds like you’ve been through something like this.”

  “Look, when I was in college I did an internship at Starbucks. I studied what they did. They had this predatory model down. They would find independent coffee houses operating in nice neighborhoods. Starbucks would go and open an outlet literally right next door to them. Take away half their business, and sweat them out. Eventually, the independent starts losing money, can’t afford to stay open any longer, and they go under. Starbucks then takes the rest of their business. Just because they had the money to wait for them to go belly-up. Same thing’s going to happen here.”

  “Interesting,” I said, thinking this made an awful lot of sense, and that Zander Foley likely had no intention of starting his own fledgling business in a shaky industry by stealing scooters from WAVE. “And is there any way to stop big competitors from coming in?”

  He took a sip of Red Bull. “Be first in, get established quickly, get customers to feel like they’re a part of something new, something cool. Sometimes customers can develop an emotional attachment that transcends anything else. But realistically, if a big company comes in offering the same service, they can cut prices, and you both hemorrhage money until one of you taps out. Just like what Starbucks has been doing. In the end, customers vote with their wallets. This is America. The big guys usually win. After they kill off the competition, they raise prices back up and corner the market. Cut a deal with the cities, and limit new competitors coming in. So customers have nowhere else to go. That’s how it’s done.”

  I let out a low whistle. This was something more real-world than my economics professor from a few years ago had postulated, but the idea was the same. You could be first, you could be smartest, you could be biggest, or you could cheat. I wondered if it were possible to do all four.

  “Can a business like WAVE be made to work?”

  Zander sighed. “I’m not sure they can. But being nimble and being agile helps, and like I pointed out, being first is a good thing. Listen to good ideas. Employees would tell Cody we need to set up docking stations near bus stops and metro rail stations. You know, people getting off a bus or train could take a scooter home quickly, rather than have to walk a few blocks. Add a compartment for people to store a briefcase or a laptop. Stuff like that.”

  “And he didn’t like those ideas?” I asked.

  “Nah, he just placed them at boardwalks by the beach, near colleges, near wealthy communities. This is where arrogance gets in the way. If the ideas don’t flow from Cody or Ryan or Sean, it’s like they don’t exist. Their goal is to simply try and get an enormous injection of cash, to essentially become just like the big boys. Running the day-to-day business, that wasn’t their thing. And I think that was part of the problem Cody had with Kristy. She had ideas, and he just dismissed them.”

  “Think he felt threatened?”

  “Being around a smart woman? Maybe. But Cody always had women.”

  “Any in particular?” I asked.

  “Oh, he had this sometime girlfriend he’d bring around the office once in a while.”

  “Sometime girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, I think her name might have been Stella. Kind of smart, I guess. But he also kind of went out with a few girls from work.”

  I thought about this, but something just wasn’t fitting together here. I decided to go down another avenue.

  “So, you got fired,” I said conversationally.

  He gave me an odd look. “Uh-huh.”

  “Why? Sounds like you know this business. You seem to know what you’re talking about.”

  “I spoke my mind. I don’t think the founders wanted to hear it. They made up a story about disappearing scooters and accused me of stealing them, which was ridiculous. But they wanted me out, and this was an easy way for them to get rid of me, and not have to pay any severance. And not have to worry about employees getting upset. People getting fired for no reason always upsets an organization. So they trumped up some bogus charges, and got themselves a good excuse to get rid of me.”

  “I heard you got screwed out of some money. That right?”

  He gave me an odd look. “You know about that?”

  “I know some of it. Any details you can fill in?”

  Zander shrugged. “I had a contract. When I got let go, the company owed me some money. Bonus and stock, not that the stock is going to be worth much, but there were severance agreements in place. Ever hear the saying, negotiate your exit package before you’re hired?”

  “No,” I said. “Can’t say as I’ve heard that one.”

  “It’s how things are often done. Except at crappy companies like WAVE, where they try and welsh on the deal.”

  “Then what’s your plan?”

  “What else?” he said. “Get a lawyer, sue, let the attorneys hash it out. Settle on a figure and move on.”

  “Okay. What do you think Cody and his pals are up to?”

  “Like I said, I think their main goal is to keep raising money through Angel funding, live a great lifestyle, spend as much as they can on themselves, and when it all ends, just walk away. I got in the way of that. So did Kristy.”

  “You think there was anything to Kristy possibly getting fired?”

  Zander shook his head. “Hard to say, but you were right, earlier; it’s tough to fire family. And I can’t say for sure. But I don’t think she had much of a personal life. Aside from business, I don’t know that she had much of anything else going on. She didn’t seem very happy.”

  *

  I looked up Stella Frey on the internet, and while there wasn’t an address listed for her, there was a phone number. I called and she picked up, but, she wouldn’t let me come to her apartment. Smart girl, I thought. We decided to meet nearby, at the Fox Hills Mall. She needed to do some shopping and I needed lunch, so she suggested we meet at the food court on the top level of the mall.

  Stella Frey was a pretty woman in her mid-twenties, with long brown hair and a too-deep suntan. She was wearing a halter top, yoga pants, and running shoes. I knew it was Stella Frey because she said she’d be the one with a Vans bag next to her. When I approached her, she was seated at an empty table, working her phone, with only a half-full bottle of acai-blueberry Vitamin Water in front of her.

  “Hi, there,” I said. “You must be Stella.”

  “I am, I am,’ she smiled, and half stood up to shake my hand. “I just need to finish this one text.”

  I looked around at the food choices and saw pretty much what I expected to see. A Subway, a pizza kiosk, two Asian places, and opportunities for burgers, cheesesteaks, and chicken wings of varying levels of quality. These were indeed options, but not ones I wanted to exercise. I finally chose the daily special at Subway. When in doubt, brand names matter, and a five-dollar, foot-long turkey sub provided, in addition to basic sustenance, a good value. I sat down and looked around at the lunchtime crowd. It was a very L.A. crowd, which meant it skewed young, and it looked very much like a U.N. summit. A young man with ripped biceps sat at the next table, e
ating a bowl of teriyaki chicken and brown rice, wearing a yellow t-shirt that said Super-Fit. It reminded me of something, and I made a mental note to follow up later on that. Turning back to my sub, I took a large bite just as Stella hit the Send button and looked back up at me.

  “There!” she said. “Sorry about that. I’m leaving on a trip in a few days, and I needed to make a few arrangements.”

  “Ah,” I said between bites. “Where are you headed?”

  “Italy,” she smiled. “Rome, Florence, Venice, Tuscany. I’ll be there for a month. I love Italy. The food, the people, the museums. I studied art history in college. Oh, I mean that wasn’t exactly my major, but, I took a lot of classes in it. That’s what I love.”

  “Italy,” I said, thinking back to Marcus’s friend going to Rome soon. “I hear they have great gelato there.”

  “They do, they do,” she exclaimed. “The famous one is Vivoli in Florence. But I know a few that are a little better. Off the beaten track, so to speak. But to be honest, the best gelato I ever had is at a place where I grew up.”

  “Laguna Beach?” I asked.

  “Hard to believe, but yes. Right in town, it’s called Paradiso. Sometimes you don’t have to go far to find what you want.”

  “Wise words,” I said. “Just what kind of job do you have that lets you take a month off?”

  “Teacher,” she said. “I teach kindergarten at Westside Neighborhood School. Over in Playa Vista.”

  I looked at her. “That’s right near WAVE.”

  “It is, just down the street. I get to go over and see Cody sometimes, you know, at the end of the day. But yeah, teaching is great, getting summers off is an awesome part of the job.”

  I recalled something one of my teammates at SC had said a long time ago. His parents were telling him he should get a teaching degree so he’d have something to fall back on if his glorious plan for an NFL career didn’t work out. They also pointed out the attractive perk of getting summers off. His retort was that if the best part of a job was the time you’re not there, what kind of a job could it possibly be? There’s nothing wrong with being a teacher if that’s where your passion is, but clearly, some people are born to teach, and my teammate was not one of them. In the end, he did make it in the NFL. He wasn’t the best athlete, but he taught himself to be a long-snapper, meaning he was able to throw tight, accurate spiral passes between his legs, while looking upside down. There is a right job for everyone in this world, and for him, it was being an integral part of punts and field-goal attempts. He spent fourteen years in the league, where the minimum wage can eventually exceed one million dollars a season. After a few years, he wound up buying his parents a brand new house.