Flat Spin

by David Freed

  “I’m sure on some level he cared for you both.”

  “You obviously didn’t know him very well then.”

  I’ve never understood how two people who once vowed to spend eternity together could grow so far apart that one or both of them would be glad to see the other planted six feet under. I asked her if she had anything to do with his death.

  “I only wish,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine ever enjoying anything more.”

  “I understand he stole a ring from you.”

  “Not just a ring. My grandmother’s wedding ring.”

  “You get divorced and six years later, you discover the ring missing? How does that work?”

  “I didn’t realize he’d taken it until a couple of months ago. I was inventorying all my jewelry to update the insurance. We had a small safe deposit box I’d forgotten all about. The bank records showed that Arlo was the only person who had accessed the box.”

  “Did you threaten to put a contract out on him?”

  She stared at me hard. “Arlo Echevarria was a piece of filth. He lied to me. He lied to everyone he ever met. He was a worthless, conniving husband and a worthless, disengaged father. I mean, it tells you something when your own son hates you. I would’ve killed him myself, believe me, with my own hands, if I could’ve gotten away with it.”

  “So you had somebody else do it for you.”

  Janice laughed. “If I knew people like that, Logan, I’d take out half of Congress,” she said with a blunt candor that told me she was likely telling the truth, “and I wouldn’t stop there.”

  She told me that she and her husband were visiting his family in the Philippines when they got the news. Someone from the LAPD telephoned in the middle of the night, a lady police officer—she didn’t catch the name—who apologized for calling so late and said it was her sad duty to inform Janice that her former spouse had met with apparent foul play. She told Janice she was sorry for her loss, to which Janice said she replied, “What loss?”

  “She asked me if I had any idea of who might’ve shot him,” Janice said, licking chocolate from her little finger. “I told her I didn’t know and I didn’t care. Arlo was already dead to me, a long time before that.”

  The officer asked as a matter of routine if Janice could vouch for her whereabouts in the days leading up to Echevarria’s death. She said she provided the names of each of her chauffeurs, cooks, gardeners, maids, corporate pilots and masseuse. All of them, she said, confirmed that she’d been abroad when Echevarria was gunned down. She even volunteered to take a polygraph some weeks later, which she said she aced. The same, she acknowledged, could not be said for their son, Micah.

  “They gave him a lie-detector test and it came back ‘inconclusive.’ He was just nervous. The police knew that. Micah would never hurt anybody.”

  “Not even the father he despised?”

  “He had no use for his father, just like his father had no use for him. Quite frankly, Micah has no interest in how Arlo died, and neither do I.”

  “Then why’d you agree to see me?”

  She set her cup down on the coffee table and smoothed her skirt. “My husband’s away on a business trip for three weeks. I’m fucking bored.” The come-hither quality of her smile was the very definition of transparent.

  “Where’d he go, your husband, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Kazakhstan. Looking at oil properties.”

  “It’s all the rage,” I said. “Everybody used to go to Disneyworld. Now they go to Kazakhstan.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I should be going.” I stood.

  Disappointed by my apparent lack of carnal interest in her, she turned with sagged shoulders and watched a freighter heading out to sea under the Golden Gate, its deck stacked five deep with multicolored cargo containers.

  “I’d like to talk to your son,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “To see what, if anything, he might know about the circumstances of Arlo’s death.”

  “I don’t know his current address. He was living somewhere in the East Bay last I heard. He moves around a lot.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have his cell phone number?”

  She sighed, jotted the number on a slip of paper and handed it to me.

  “I don’t approve of my son’s lifestyle,” Janice said, “but if you do see him, tell him I still love him.”

  I called Micah Echevarria later that morning. Before hanging up on me, he said he didn’t want to talk to me about his father or anything else. When I called him back to say I thought we’d been cut off, he told me to kiss off and hung up again. Whatever happened to telephone etiquette?

  I drove across the Bay Bridge into Oakland and stopped for a late breakfast at the Full House Café on MacArthur Boulevard. I’d discovered the Full House years before while tailing an agent from a Middle Eastern country who’d gone there to meet with two Hezbollah operatives interested in acquiring stolen Army antitank missiles. I’d grabbed a seat at the counter—an electro-acoustic listening bud planted in my ear—and feasted on red hash made from beets and pork sausage while the Arabs negotiated a price for the missiles at a table near the window. After breakfast, I followed them to a self-storage yard across from the San Mateo County Fairgrounds where the rockets were stashed, then on toward Reno, where they intended to celebrate their deal by touring the local whorehouses. They never made it to Nevada. All three died when their rental car spun off an icy Donner Pass. The CHP called it brake failure. My supervisors called it a job well done.

  The Full House had changed little over the years since I’d been there. I ordered my eggs over easy, called Buzz and asked for another favor.

  “I’m still waiting on that gift certificate,” he said.

  “It’s in the mail.”

  “Like I’ve never heard that before.”

  I gave him Micah Echevarria’s cell phone number. I needed a corresponding address, I said, and any other readily available information that might offer me relevant insights as to what made the kid tick. I also wanted to know if there was anything in any intelligence files implicating Harry Ramos, Janice Echevarria’s second husband, whose interests in Kazakhstan oil seemed to coincide with those of my former father-in-law and his prospective Russian business partner, Pavel Tarasov. Buzz said he’d have to call me back.

  I was finished with breakfast and working on my third cup of coffee when he did.

  There were abundant references to Ramos on file, Buzz said, mostly having to do with his many overseas investments, but nothing to suggest that he, either personally or by corporate DBA, had ever been associated with any known intelligence operations, foreign or domestic. Nor had he ever been implicated in any criminal investigations. Computerized link analysis failed to connect him even remotely to Tarasov or, for the matter, Gil Carlisle.

  Echevarria’s son came out clean, too, Buzz said, at least as far as intelligence activities were concerned. The kid’s arrest record was another matter. Buzz had run his name through the FBI’s NCIC database. Micah Echevarria and California’s penal codes were hardly strangers: two citations for a minor in possession of alcohol, one misdemeanor shoplifting charge reduced to an infraction, and one third-degree assault charge as a result of a street fight for which he’d spent a month in the San Jose County Jail. In the three years since being issued a driver’s license, he’d chalked up three moving violations, all for speeding. He rode a Harley.

  I thanked Buzz yet again for his help, and told him I owed him big-time.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “the check’s in the mail. Spare me.”

  Some say the West Oakland neighborhood known as Ghost Town derived its moniker from the two casket companies that once competed for business there. Others say it’s because of the killings that have plagued the area for decades. One thing beyond debate is that Ghost Town is the kind of place where even the police don’t go at night unless they’re obligated to—and only
then with overwhelming backup. Just my luck that Arlo Echevarria’s son resided in the heart of Ghost Town.

  The address Buzz provided was off of 30th and Union streets in the shadow of the 580 Freeway, a bedraggled duplex sandwiched between two small warehouses. There were steel burglar bars bolted to the windows and gang graffiti splashed on the clapboard walls. A Chevy Caprice Classic, its hood and trunk open to the sky, sat rusting on the dirt amid a sea of calcified dog poop that passed for a front yard.

  I observed no motorcycle as I cruised past. I drove around the block, parked my rental subcompact four houses up the street, and waited for Micah Echevarria to come home.

  The first gangster, a lookout, showed up within five minutes of my arrival. He was pedaling a tricked-out bicycle absurdly small for his lanky, sixteen-year-old frame, checking me out as he rolled past—ridiculously oversized blue jeans bagging, boxer shorts showing, wearing a black, oversized Raiders hoodie with the hood up, and sucking on a Tootsie Pop. He coasted down the street, glanced at me over his shoulder once more and veered around the corner, out of sight.

  Another ten minutes passed and there he was again, still on his bike, this time escorted by five other homeboys on foot. They strode all big and bad toward my car with their hands shoved menacingly in their pockets. I rolled down the window.

  “What’s up, gents?”

  The oldest among them was also the biggest. He was about twenty. He looked like a cross between Tupac and the left side of the Raider defensive line.

  “Where you from, man?” Tupac demanded.

  “A better question might be, ‘Where am I going?’ Or, ‘How can I change myself to become a happier and more compassionate human being?’ Or, ‘How can I find common ground between my spiritual self and my ever-growing understanding of the natural world?’”

  The homeboys looked at each other.

  “No, man,” Tupac repeated, “I mean, like, where you from?”

  “Oh, you mean, like, where am I from? Like, am I from county probation and am I here to violate every one of your sorry asses for carrying concealed weapons and associating with known felons? Or am I, like, a decoy cop, sitting here waiting for some little shitheads to try and jack me, so that my SWAT backups, who are all camped out right around the corner and just dying to kick your sorry asses, can come flying in here and make it on to the next episode of Cops? Is that, like, what you mean?”

  A couple of the ’bangers glanced over their shoulders, looking for the Oakland SWAT team, wiping their mouths anxiously, blinking a little faster.

  “He ain’t nothin’,” the kid on the bike said to Tupac.

  Tupac grunted contemptuously and spit sideways, eyeing me the entire time. “Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing,” he said, and walked on, a kiss-my-ass, Snoop Dog hitch in his get-along. The others followed after him like he was the Pied Piper.

  I uncocked the revolver in my hand and stuffed it back in my belt. Nobody bothered me after that.

  Micah Echevarria thundered home on his Harley hog around eight P.m. wearing a crash helmet reminiscent of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and a Marlon Brando leather jacket with a “California Mongols” patch stitched across the back. He rumbled into the front yard and up the porch steps, unstrapped his helmet, and lashed the bike to the railing with a padlocked chain looped through the front forks. Then he unlocked the door and started inside. I went in right behind him.

  “Welcome home, Micah.”

  He tried to fend me off, but I already had a solid arm bar on him. He was face down on the living room floor before he knew it, his wrist twisted behind him, my knee in his back.

  “What the fuck!”

  “Relax, buddy. I’m Logan. We spoke earlier. I just want to talk.”

  “I told you! I got nothing to say to you! Now, get the fuck outta my house before I fuckin’ call the cops!”

  I patted him down. He had a Rambo-style hunting knife in his right boot. I tossed it on the carpet, out of his reach.

  “I’m going to let you up now, OK? Nice and easy. Just talk, that’s all.”

  Slowly I eased my grip on his arm and backed off. He laid there on the carpet trying to catch his breath. I’d last seen him when he was in elementary school. Arlo was hosting a Super Bowl party and had rented an ocean-view suite at Miami’s Fontainebleau hotel on the government’s dime. Select members of Alpha were invited with their significant others. Savannah and I went. It was the only time I ever saw Echevarria interact with his son—if you can call giving an insecure kid twenty bucks and telling him to go hang out at the pool by himself interaction. I didn’t pay much attention to Micah Echevarria that day, either, I’m ashamed to say. Nor did I pay much attention to the moves Echevarria was putting on my wife. I was too busy watching the game and slamming down free liquor. Micah was a gawky fledgling back then. He’d grown into a slender, handsome young man, with a face predominated by his mother’s sharp features and his father’s dark-hued skin tone. His hair was straggly and clung to his face in long, sweaty strands. He had a wispy Fu Manchu moustache.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  He sat up, rubbing his wrist. “Go fuck yourself,” he said.

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to your father, who killed him.”

  “I don’t give a shit what happened to my father.”

  I went to help him up. He pushed my hand angrily aside, stood and walked into the kitchen. The place was a pit. Filthy pots and dishes piled in the sink. The trash overflowing with empty beer bottles. Motorcycle parts strewn about the greasy linoleum floor. A bong shaped like a skull resting on the counter. Micah opened the refrigerator and uncapped a Corona.

  I asked him what he was doing when he got the news that his father had been killed.

  He took a long swallow of beer. “I don’t fucking remember.”

  “How did you find out he was dead?”

  “My mother called. Look, there’s nothin’ I can tell you, OK? I didn’t know the dude. I can’t remember the last time I even fucking saw him. So why don’t you just fucking leave.”

  He walked past me and back into the living room. Posters of Hendrix and Che Guevara were tacked to the wall. He plopped down on the futon, jammed his knife back inside his boot, grabbed the TV remote and started watching Animal Planet. A bunch of meerkats were running around. I sat down beside him.

  “My cat loves this show,” I said. “What he really loves, though, is Sponge Bob.”

  Micah wouldn’t look at me. “Look, I don’t know who shot my old man,” he said. “If you’re thinking it was me, it wasn’t, OK? I was in school when it happened.”

  “Your old man was killed a couple of hours before midnight. Must be night school.”

  The kid changed channels. A professional wrestler dressed like Zorro was bashing his opponent across the back with an acoustic guitar.

  I persisted. “What kind of school meets that late at night?”

  Annoyed, Micah dug through a jumble of junk mail heaped atop an overturned cardboard box that doubled as a lamp table. He found what he was looking for and tossed it in my lap: a brochure for something called Oaksterdam University. I glanced through it while wrestlers beat the pretend tar out of each other on TV.

  Oaksterdam University was a trade school that gave new meaning to the expression, “higher education.” The school prepared its students for positions in California’s booming medical marijuana industry. For $200 tuition, you could learn all about how to grow your own weed, which strains work best on which ailments, and how to open your own pot dispensary. You could also learn ways to minimize the chances of the DEA raiding your dispensary and sending you to prison for violating federal narcotics regulations.

  “Must be a total trip,” I said, “going to Oaksterdam home football games.”

  The front door opened. A young woman walked in toting a twelve-pack of Coronas. She was Asian. Petite. Pretty. Doc Martens boots, camo cargo pants, tight-fitting black tank top. There was a small silver hoop in her
lower lip and matching rings in each nostril. Both eyebrows were similarly pierced, as was the cartilage up and down both ears. She paused, surprised, with her hand on the knob, like she was interrupting something important.

  “Come on in,” I said, standing. “We were just finishing up, weren’t we, Mr. Echevarria?”

  “He knows my old man,” he said to the girl, then corrected himself, “or did.”

  “Cool.”

  She shut the door, walked into the kitchen and stashed the beer in the refrigerator.

  I left my card on the TV and walked to the front door. The girl sat down close beside Micah on the futon and fired up a Marlboro light. I told him I was sorry about what happened to his father. I wished they’d enjoyed a closer relationship, I said, but that sometimes, that’s how it goes between fathers and sons. I quoted William Penn, about how a child taught to live on little owes more to his old man’s wisdom than the kid whose old man gives him everything.

  “Who’s William Penn?” the girl said.

  “A lot of people think he’s the guy on the Quaker Oats box, but Quaker Oats says the resemblance is merely coincidental. By the way, Micah, before I forget, your mother said to tell you she still loves you.”

  He stared at the TV and pretended not to hear me.

  I left.

  Two pit bulls were playing tug-of-war in the yard across the street with what was left of a lime-green bra. They forgot the bra and started barking and snarling at me through the chain-link fence as I walked to my car.

  “Hey.”

  I turned. Micah’s girlfriend bounded out the front door, down the steps after me.

  “He’s really a very sweet guy,” she said. “Sweetest guy I’ve ever known. He’s just a little freaked out right now.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “He wants everybody to think he hated his dad. But when his mom told him what happened, he started crying. I mean, he was really broke up about it. Couldn’t sleep for days. Couldn’t eat. I think he was maybe hoping they could get together some day, but now . . .” She exhaled. “I just thought you should know, being how you used to work with him.”