At the main attraction, an original Gutenberg Bible, we milled about with the other gawkers to get a glimpse of this rarest of rare books. I glanced at the security guard standing a few paces off to the side. He was a middle-aged black man with watery eyes and graying sideburns. He kept his hands clasped behind his back as only a museum guard would do. Apparently, it was his job to make sure no one flipped through the Bible to their favorite psalm. But really there was nothing for him to do as the Bible was encased in what looked like bullet-proof, UV-proof, everything-proof glass. His job was then to stand there for eight hours and do nothing. Although he was my height, he seemed shorter, like the great weight of boredom was ever so slightly pressing down on his shoulders in five second intervals. He then looked up and caught me staring at him. He had a glazed look that screamed, “Shoot me!”
I turned to Cheli and was dismayed to see the same glazed look as the guard. And if there had been a mirror in the room, I am certain that same look would have stared back at me in my reflection.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Really?”
“Are you enjoying this?”
“Not at all,” she said and took my hand and led me out of the museum.
* * *
We took my car and drove through the side streets of San Marino. As the Spanish estates melted away, so did the water-cooler talk and we felt at ease for the first time that day. The conversation slipped back to what we were comfortable with, the only thing we really shared, which was Ed’s disappearance. I filled Cheli in on the developments I had learned from Mike, leaving out any details involving Claire. She fixed her eyes on a distant spot in front of us as she processed the details, slightly nodding her head as she catalogued each piece of information. She reverted back to who she was, the detective. A detective in a yellow sun dress.
“Is anything they did in building these low-income units illegal?”
“As disgusting as it sounds, it’s all above board.”
“Then why kill Langford?”
“Or Ed?”
“We don’t know for sure Mr. Vadaresian is dead,” she corrected. “But argument’s sake, why kill him if it was an above-the-board deal that seemed to work for all sides? Langford was doing his deals and getting paid. Mr. Vadaresian was selling a building he wanted to sell and which sat for a long time on the market.”
“Maybe they realized there was bigger money involved?”
“In what?” she asked.
Cheli was nosing around the issue I wanted to avoid, namely, the fact that Claire and McIntyre and presumably Valenti were somehow connected.
“These low-income housing community redevelopment projects can be big business.”
“Says who?”
“My friend Mike Wagner.”
She nodded her head, acknowledging the name.
“You know Mike?”
“Of him. He did a story on some officers on the GPD who were using DUI checkpoints as a way to get sexual favors from women caught up in the net. They’d threaten them with jail time but offered to let them go if they performed…acts on them. It burned the department pretty badly,” she said in anger.
“You seem upset about the story. If what Mike wrote was true, then he’s done a good job exposing it.”
“I’m not angry at your friend,” she explained, “but at the department. They put on a big dog-and-pony show, mandatory suspensions, closed-door investigations into misconduct, speeches in the paper. Then just sort of let the story die. They purposely drew it out until people lost interest. In the end, no one lost their job. One of them even got his shield before me,” she added bitterly.
“That doesn’t sound fair.”
“Not much is for a woman on the force.”
I could visibly see her swallow the resentment that had seeped into her voice.
“So where did you guys leave it?” she asked.
“Mike’s following up on another lead. It could be just a coincidence but a few months after the purchase of these buildings, there was another batch of transactions on an adjacent block to the properties we’re talking about.”
“More factory conversions into low-income housing?”
“Not really,” I explained. “These were residential sales. Four-unit apartment complexes, single family homes, et cetera. All bought within a month. All on the same block. All bought by the same person.”
“Do you think it’s connected?”
“Not sure. Mike said he was going to do some research on it, maybe talk to the owners.”
“Why wait for Mike?” she quickly threw out.
I pulled my eyes from the road to study her.
“Seriously?”
“Why not?” she said, looking around at the neighborhood. “We’re almost in Lincoln Heights already.”
In all the talking, I had managed to drive us all the way through South Pas and Hermon and now skirted the bottom of Monetcito Heights. Lincoln Heights was on the next bluff.
“You want to go knocking on doors on our first date?”
“It’ll be fun,” she laughed. “We can pretend to be partners. How’s your Spanish?”
“Yo conothzco español,” I said in my best Castillian accent with a heavy lisp on the ‘z’.
“That’s horrible!” she laughed. “They’ll think you’re a Mormon and slam the door in your face.”
MIRADA ARRASADORA
“Because they have to,” was the only answer.
Cheli and I parked on a dusty street a stone’s throw from the Deakins Building and the proposed new development that Carmen Hernandez was scheduled to build. I could see the Deakins’s rooftop looming over a ramshackle row of houses built so close to the street that the asphalt, concrete sidewalk, and front yards melded into a long, barren strip devoid of vegetation save for the occasional ragweed creeping out of a crack in the road. The whole block was unnaturally flat, like a giant bulldozer had smoothed the field and tamped out even the slightest deviation in the earth’s surface. It produced a great leveling effect where everyone seemed to operate on the same plane, where a person making morning coffee was at eye level with whomever happened to be strolling by out front.
The sun was intense and unobstructed. The only solace from its glare was the narrow strip of shade cast by the eight or so telephone poles that dotted the block. Standing in one of those shadows was an abuelita waiting for the local bus. She covered herself in a long skirt and a blouse that tied tightly at her wrists. She had a lizard-like stillness to her, as if any exertion would prove too much, and possibly give her away to whatever predator was lurking nearby.
“Buenos tardes,” Cheli said and asked her if she lived in the neighborhood. The abuelita didn’t answer right away. She studied Cheli, then looked at me, and grew even more suspicious. My sheepish wave didn’t help ease her concern.
Cheli explained who she was and offered up her badge as proof of her identity. The old woman studied the badge like it was a legal contract written in Sanskrit.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Cheli continued in Spanish. “Do you live in this neighborhood?”
“Sí,” the old woman answered.
Cheli asked her several more questions, and I gathered from picking out a few words I knew and the fact that Cheli kept checking the list of sales on the paper Mike had provided that she was trying to figure out if the woman resided in one of the properties in question. The abuelita brightened when hearing one of the addresses and even stepped out of her spot in the shade. She approached me and started rambling in Spanish.
“I don’t understand,” I pleaded, which did nothing to slow the onslaught. “Cheli, why is she talking to me?”
“She thinks you’re the police,” she explained.
“Me?”
“And I’m your…translator.”
Discrimination was often perpetuated the most by one’s own people.
“Tell her I don’t understand,” I said. “Tell her I am not the police, t
hat you are.”
“She won’t listen,” she answered over the old woman’s cackling rant. Cheli reluctantly stepped into the role of translator and stood by my side.
“She says she has lived here for over twelve years. They don’t make any trouble and no one bothers them. It’s just her and her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren. She works over in Cypress Park at a shipping company. She says she is legally here —”
“It’s okay,” I told the woman, “we aren’t interested in that.”
The abuelita smiled as Cheli translated. She then said something to Cheli which made her blush. Cheli tried to brush it off but the old woman kept at her.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Cheli replied.
“Clearly something is being said.”
Cheli shrugged. “She tells me I need a man like you.”
“Is that so?” I smiled.
The old woman stroked my arm and spoke into my eyes.
“She says you are kind and strong and —”
“And what?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on,” I pleaded. “Tell me.”
“You, um, have mirada arrasadora.”
“Which means what?”
“Bedroom eyes,” she said.
“Is that so?” I laughed. “I usually get ‘smoldering’ but bedroom eyes isn’t bad.”
“You realize you are preening like a peacock after being hit on by an eighty-year-old woman.”
“The old ones know from experience,” I told Cheli. “Maybe you should listen to your elders.”
Cheli interrupted the love-fest and pumped the old lady for information. There was an issue several months back when some men showed up at her door and started asking her a lot of questions about her immigration status. Apparently the earlier part about being legal wasn’t entirely accurate. Her grandchildren were legal, having been born in the States, but she and her daughter-in-law were undocumented.
“Were these immigration officials?” I asked.
“I.C.E.?” the old woman repeated. “No, no, not I.C.E.”
“What did they want with you?” Cheli asked.
The abuelita explained that these men threatened to turn them in to the authorities. They somehow knew, or guessed, she was not in the country legally. They also knew she had her family and warned her that she was putting her grandchildren at risk of losing their mother and grandmother.
“So now we have vigilante immigration officers?” I said. The truth was the abuelita was never in much danger if they did turn her in. The system was so backlogged with illegals that they had a difficult enough time deporting ones in the prison system, never mind ones living a respectable and quiet life in the community.
The old woman went on to explain that these men said they would leave her alone if she did them a favor.
“What kind of favor?”
The woman’s response appeared to puzzle Cheli.
“What’d she say?” I asked.
“They told her to stop paying her rent.”
A similar story was told at several of the properties in question. Most involved some sort of threat, whether it be related to the occupants’ immigration status or just the good old-fashioned violent kind of threat. Those who were told to stop paying their rent were also told that these same men would protect them if the landlord tried to get tough with them.
Evicting someone from a property is a long, drawn-out affair involving court orders, U.S. marshals and endless documentation. Many deadbeat tenants manage to hang on for months after the initial request to vacate. In the poorer neighborhoods where the oversight was lax and the participants were largely unaware of their rights, the eviction process was often much faster and much nastier. It mostly involved a new set of locks, your belongings piled on the sidewalk, and a German shepherd on the stoop in case you got any bright ideas about returning. Clearly, the men who threatened the abuelita and the other residents knew how the landlords would retaliate. The question of why they went through all this trouble was answered when we tracked down one of the owners of the buildings.
This particular building was the worst of a pretty bad lot. The carpets were stained and rank, the windows grimy and cracked and in some cases missing the panes entirely. Darkened corners of rooms were darkened further by patches of mold that contributed to the sour air and tickled the back of the throat.
The owner was a rotund Latino who lived in his own filth in an apartment in the back and only left his stoop to collect the rent money, cash-only. He was that rare breed of fat man who was neither jolly nor gentle. A cheap oscillating fan was perched behind him and with each pass we got a whiff of diabetes and deodorant soap.
“They told me if I went to the police, they’d hurt me so bad I’d never walk again,” the man explained. “So I went to the police anyway.” He rubbed his knee, “I just got the cast off last week. They shattered my knee cap. They hit me ten times in the same spot. I won’t be able to walk much anymore,” he added.
Knowing what he made people pay to live in conditions not worthy of a dog, and the anger I felt towards him, couldn’t offset at least some compassion for another human suffering like he did. The knee was a leaky mess, crisscrossed with operation scars and pink circles where the holes were that drained the area of fluids.
“What’d they want from you?” asked Cheli.
“This building. First they tell everyone to stop paying rent and they put the squeeze on me. They know I need the money. It’s my only income. But I’m a stubborn bastard,” he explained. “I don’t budge easy.”
He was right about that. It’d take a forklift to get him out of the chair.
“A few weeks later there’s these guys again with a few friends in my living room. I told them I’d sell. They accepted the offer but gave me a beating anyway.”
“I assume you didn’t get a fair price.” I said.
“What do you think?” he said. “Now I got to figure out what to do when the money I got from the sale runs out.”
“Can you describe the men?” I asked.
“Nothing special,” he replied. “Just your regular set of Armos.”
Cheli and I shared a look.
“They were Armenians,” I stated.
Cheli pulled up a series of mugshots on her smart phone, the same ones she had me look through after the incident at the tire shop. The obese man picked out a few.
“These guys all look the same,” he laughed.
But then he settled on one picture.
“This is the guy,” he announced. “He’s the one who told me what to do.” He held up the phone. On it was a photo of the hook-nosed, junior-vor, Ardavan Temekian.
It was another link in the complicated story. The AP had possibly threatened Ed regarding the Deakins Building and now they muscled their way into buying a strip of buildings on the cheap. What was unclear was their motivation.
As we got into my car I took a good look at this neighborhood and all that was being fought for and wondered why anyone would want to live there at all.
“Because they have to,” Cheli said.
* * *
As the sun started to slip behind the hill, we stopped off at a crowded Mexican seafood stand and split a ceviche cocktail. It came in a goblet full of shrimp and whitefish and a spicy tomato broth. We chased it down with cans of Tecate dipped in salt and given a good squeeze of lime. Overhead, clear bags of water and vinegar hung from the rafters, apparently to keep the flies away, but it didn’t seem to be working as the buzzing of wings nearly drowned out the busy street.
“Is that supposed to get rid of the flies or attract them?” I asked.
“As kids we used to put ammonia in a bag to keep stray cats from peeing on the grass in front of our house.”
“Did it work?”
“About as well as it is with these flies.”
We talked about a lot of things and as the cans of Tecate kept coming the stories got more personal and I fin
ally got a clearer picture of Detective Alvarado. She grew up in a rundown area of East L.A. Her parents were both first generation Mexican-Americans tracing their roots back to a small barrio outside the coastal town of Mazatlan. “Shrimp was a big part of my childhood,” she laughed. After the age of six she was pretty much raised by her mother. Her father didn’t up and disappear as much as he sort of drifted away. One night away from the house turned into two. A few years later, he was more a guest of the house, in town for just the weekend. Her mother always welcomed him home but he never stayed long. He was the houseguest you actually wanted to stay longer. There was “another woman” but Cheli didn’t think that was an accurate description. “There was more than just one,” she smiled, but there was pain behind it.
Cheli had a brother who never amounted to much of anything unless you put stock in extended stays at Lompoc.
“It was all minor stuff but if you add up enough small infractions, eventually they turn into a long sentence. He isn’t a gangbanger, just a screw up. El Principe sure knows how to find trouble.”
“What’s that mean? ‘El Principe’?”
She blushed, “Oh, just a stupid name I gave him when I was a teenager. It means ‘The Prince.’ In my mom’s eyes, that boy could do no wrong. Not that I am bitter, or anything! Let’s just say in a Latino family, the men can do no wrong.”
“I’m not so sure that’s unique to Latinos.”
“Maybe, but we Latinos have a special way of putting men on pedestals,” she said.
“Well, you must be the prodigal child, Detective Alvarado.”
“You would think,” she shot back. And I could tell she no longer wanted to talk about it. It sounded like she was in that vortex we all fall into of perpetually trying to please the people who turn us away. She quickly changed the subject. “I want you to be more careful. I know you find this detective stuff interesting but this isn’t a game.”
Smile Now, Cry Later (Chuck Restic Mystery Book 1) Page 9
