The house was alarmed, and if Claire had changed the locks on the doors she had certainly changed the code to the alarm. The last thing I wanted was to trip that system and have Claire, and the police, get a notice that someone was breaking into the house. Then I remembered one of the arguments we had earlier in the year.
Claire was a stickler over natural light. “Why live in LA if you are going to sit in the dark?” she would say. Although our house had an expansive southern exposure out the back, the front of the house was fairly dark as it bumped up into the hillside and was encased by retaining walls that kept the earth from washing us away during the next big rainstorm. No matter how many lamps, hanging fixtures, or LED strips we bought, Claire still complained it was too dark and insisted on putting in a skylight. I fought it; she won. Since the skylight was installed after the alarm system was put in, the unit itself was not linked to the circuit. And Claire always forgot to lock it, despite my numerous reminders.
I went around to the side of the house and climbed up onto the retaining wall, now slick with ice plant and ivy. It was a simple step onto the roof and three more steps to the open skylight. I unhinged the latch and pried the bubble open. It was situated right above our bed which was the root of another argument we had after installation when I was awoken at six in the morning by a searing ray of light reserved for epiphanies. I double-checked that the bed was empty. The thought of jumping down onto Claire, and someone else, gave me the shudders.
It looked quiet, so I jumped down and was met with the stiff resistance of a memory-foam mattress. I rolled off the bed and drifted through the house in the dark. Muscle-memory guided me around sharp-edged coffee tables and over rugs that had started to curl up in spots. Nothing had changed since I had moved out and yet it felt different. This house that I had built — or at least hired a contractor and interior designer to renovate — was no longer mine, a reverse déjà vu where everything looked familiar yet nothing felt it. Things that I had bought or hung or sat on were all still there exactly where I had left them but they had lost all traces of me. It felt feminine, like the house had undergone a sex change operation in the few months since I had moved out. And tromping through it in the dark gave me the unseemly feeling that I was violating it.
I found Claire’s laptop in the living room and powered it up. It’d be better if I had her iPhone but that device would have to be surgically removed from her hand. Luckily, Claire was a Mac snob and insisted on using her home computer for work-related stuff because she did not like using PCs. Claire used the same password for all of her sites. It was the name of her childhood imaginary friend and the year she graduated from high school. A psychologist could have a field day with that.
I pulled up her personal email and waded through thousands of shopping emails, sale announcement emails, coupon emails, and more shopping emails. Claire had to be on every blast email list in the greater Los Angeles area. Ninety-five percent of her time spent communicating was filtering out all of the noise around the one or two personal emails in her box, and it didn’t seem to bother her. Claire had embraced the digital age while I tried to hide from it. I once tried to get the username “UNSUBSCRIBE” for my personal email but unfortunately it was already taken.
I sorted the emails by sender and scrolled down until I got to Todd McIntyre. There were several emails but the most intriguing was a long string with the word “ARROYO” in the subject line. An arroyo is a creek bed or wash. The common reference in Los Angeles was the Arroyo Seco — dry river bed — which ran out of Pasadena and skirted downtown and had the country’s first freeway running parallel to it. A quick scan of the emails led me to believe the Arroyo was some sort of development Claire was helping McIntyre on. The real arroyo was somewhat close to the set of buildings in the Deakins area but not close enough to make a direct connection. It just seemed too much of a coincidence so I forwarded all of the emails to my personal account and then went into the “sent” folder to delete any record of this transaction.
Just as I was about to shut down the computer, I noticed another string of emails to McIntyre but sent to a different email address. The former were to his work email but the latter were clearly to his personal. They had subject lines like “This weekend” and names of restaurants and the one that made me feel queasy, “Last night.” I resisted the urge to read them. Instead, I sorted them by date to find out when the first email to the personal account was sent, which should mark the beginning of their affair. I needed to know how long it had been going on.
I was surprised to learn that the affair didn’t begin while Claire and I were living together. It started a fair amount of time after the separation, but that only made me feel worse. Somehow it was less upsetting to know that Claire left me for someone else than to learn that she simply no longer wanted me.
I suddenly felt deflated. I passed on the idea of exiting through the skylight and just walked out the front door. The alarm wailed in the quiet night but luckily no one was very interested in investigating the cause.
CHOLOS LIKE DOO WOP
It was late by the time I got back to my apartment in Lincoln Heights. I had stopped off at a burger stand in Hollywood just to be around people. I ordered a double cheeseburger with fries and a beer but only drank the beer. I ordered two more beers and then decided if I was going to get soused I might as well do it at home where it was cheaper and I didn’t have to worry about a DUI checkpoint. I grabbed a bottle out of the refrigerator and decided to drink it right there in the kitchen and nearly downed most of it in the first few gulps. My neighbor was at it again.
I fell for you and I knew
The vision of your love-loveliness…
The song was one of my favorites and if I had any singing ability I would have belted out along with it. Instead, I sort of hummed along to the lyrics. These old ones had a way of catching you off-guard with their plaintive voices longing for that loved one who had left and gone or never showed up in the first place. But they did it in a way that felt honest. So few musicians performed love songs anymore outside of the treacle the easy listening stations played. As a rank sentimentalist I found myself reverting to the old standards just like my neighbor. Tonight’s song felt louder than normal, as if the discovery at Claire’s and the impending divorce amplified the need to wallow in self-pity. Then I noticed the back door was slightly ajar and through it pumped the music.
I rarely used that door which led to the back alley and the building’s trash bins. As a man who ate out almost every night, my trash generation was reduced to junk mail and empty beer bottles. And as such my trips to the bins were infrequent. When I did make the occasional trip I most certainly locked the door after I came back. Although I had grown to like my new neighborhood, I wasn’t so much in love to forget it was still a fairly dangerous part of town.
I stared at the thin sliver of black between the door and the frame and never felt so vulnerable to the night as I did at that moment. I took rapid, shortened breaths that felt like pure oxygen. My senses were in overload — the music thumped painfully in my ears, the chill of the bottle numbed my fingers, the smell of ammonia from the kitchen and fried tortilla from the taquería on the corner made a sickening concoction that tickled high up in my throat.
I hoped and I pray that someday
I’ll be the vision of your hap-happiness…
Two fat fingers slipped around the jam and gently pushed the door open. I didn’t move. The thought to run never entered my mind. Even the instinctual need for a weapon, any weapon, never surfaced. A small knife was at an arm’s length from where I was, yet it remained in the drawer. I just stood there and watched. I watched the door inch open a third of the way and a pale, dead-looking face appeared, partly in shadow from the shaft of light thrown off by the overhead fixture. He stared at me with no emotion. It felt like an hour.
“What are you doing here?” I asked aimlessly.
The question shook him out of his daze, as if my voice reminded him of
why he was there. He pushed the door all the way open, revealing two more men behind him. They were all in leather or dark shirts. They all had their heads shaved. I recognized one of them from the tire shop.
I was transfixed by the sheer terror of strangers entering a space they had no right to be in. I think I hunched over because I clearly remembered seeing their shoes, even knowing how many laces there were. They came at me in a slow, powerful wave. I held out my arms to defend myself but was immediately thrown back into the refrigerator. I rained harmless blows on the back of one of the attackers. One of his partners easily corralled my arm and pinned it behind me. All three then stepped back, and I was surrounded in a tight half circle. The man with the dead eyes poked at me with his left hand as his right fist came arching in from the side. I actually leaned into the punch with my eyes closed and as his fist came crashing against my ear. A warm rush enveloped my body like being submerged in melted wax. I was still on my feet, though slightly hunched over. I reached out to my attackers with a gesture you use when looking for help getting back to your feet. They instead landed punch after punch on my head and neck. My legs felt like rubber bands and only the countertop held me upright. I felt my hair being tugged and then my face hit the linoleum floor, after which commenced countless kicks to my stomach and legs and groin.
I entered some state between conscious and unconscious where I no long felt the blows but I still heard them, that fleshy sound made by the human body coming into contact with blunt trauma. The initial fear of seeing these men enter the kitchen quickly dissipated and I slipped into a perverse satisfaction at the thought of getting my ass handed to me. For the first time in my life I was physically beaten down into a lump on the floor. But I was taking it. These bastards could kick me all night if they wanted to, and although I knew the real pain would come later, in that moment, curled up as I was on the linoleum floor, I actually felt fucking great.
* * *
The light hurt the most. I had managed to roll onto my back but couldn’t find the will to roll back to my side where the pain hurt less and where the overhead fixture didn’t feel like those lamps at the dentist’s office. I draped my arm across my face and buried my eyes into the dark, soothing crook under the elbow. I lay there and listened to the labored breathing coming out of my lungs, which had its own lullaby effect. I counted the circles of light that danced on the inside of my eyelids. Just when I thought I had them all counted, they jumbled up and more were added and I had to start counting all over again.
“Jesus!” I heard a voice and then felt a pair of hands on me, this time to comfort, not to harm. They pulled back the arm covering my eyes. “Oh my god,” Cheli whispered at what must have been a frightening sight.
That damn light again bore down into my head. I tried to close my eyes but they were already narrowed to slits from the swelling.
“Can you shut off the light? It hurts my eyes,” I mumbled.
Cheli ignored me and took out her phone and started dialing.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting you an ambulance.”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
And then to prove it I somehow mustered the strength to pull myself to a seated position against the refrigerator. I slumped there with a hang-dog look.
“See.”
Cheli reluctantly hung up the phone and sat on the floor next to me.
“You’re a mess.”
“Yup.”
“I told you to not get involved —”
I waved her off.
“No lectures. Please.”
I stared at the back door wide open to the night.
“I’m cold,” I said.
Cheli got to her knees and pulled at my arms.
“We’re going to the emergency room. Come on. If you don’t help me I will drag you there.”
“No,” I pleaded. “I don’t need to go to the emergency room. I want a hot shower,” I said with my head leaning against the refrigerator. “But I don’t think I can get there myself.”
Cheli dragged me to my feet, and I put most of my weight on her shoulder. I surmised my ribs were cracked from the pain every move and each breath caused. It felt like a ten mile hike just to get to the bathroom. Cheli gently sat me down on the toilet and took off my shoes and socks and ran the water in the tub. She helped me off with my shirt.
“Forget the pants,” I said, “just help me into the tub.”
I gingerly stepped into the tub and the first wave of hot water made me woozy and instantly tired. I didn’t think I had the strength to stand so I sat down in the tub and let the water rain down on me.
“Hotter, please,” I asked.
Cheli adjusted the temperature. “How does that feel?”
“It stings.”
When the boiler ran out of hot water, Cheli helped me back to my feet. I toweled off in the room clouded over with steam. She brought in a change of clothes and helped me get dressed. She led me to the bedroom and gently lowered me onto the mattress. I protested but was asleep before I could even finish the sentence.
The music woke me up some time later. My neighbor was in a groove and deep into his collection of the slow and sad ones. I pulled myself upright and saw Cheli sitting by the window on a chair she had dragged in from the living room.
“My father used to play this song,” Cheli remarked. She had that expression of someone who had spent the last hour catching up with an old friend. She looked vulnerable and pretty.
“I never figured Latinos to be oldies fans.”
“Didn’t you know,” she replied, “cholos like doo wop. They get their girl and their beer and slow dance and reminisce about the old days. We Mexicans are a sentimental group.”
I watched Cheli drift off as the song came to its sad conclusion. There was a short pause and then it started all over again.
“Want to reminisce with me?” I asked and awkwardly scrambled to my feet. I held out my arms.
“I think you should lie back down. You don’t look so good.”
“It hurts no matter what,” I explained. “It hurts to sit and it hurts to stand. And if that’s the case I might as well stand.”
“Okay,” she said and came to the center of the room. “I’ll teach you the cholo dance. Don’t worry, it doesn’t involve much moving.” The cholo dance was a gentle rocking side to side with both arms pressed against my chest. “You have to point your thumbs up,” Cheli instructed. Once I was in the correct position, she wrapped her arms around my waist and rested her cheek on my shoulder. I was a little weak in the legs and leaned heavily on her. Cheli held me up with her arms. “Too tight?” she asked.
“No, it feels good.”
We stayed like that for three or four songs. I was dead tired but didn’t want it to stop. Eventually my neighbor gave up. He reached his limit and the endless loop gave way to the city sounds that were there all along and only now resurfaced once the music stopped. I pulled back a little to see Cheli’s face. Her eyes were swollen with tears. I didn’t know how long she had been crying but it appeared to be for a while. She tried to bury her face in my chest, but I gently pulled her back up and kissed her on the cheek and tasted her tears. I kissed both her eyes and then her lips and held her as tightly as my body would allow.
“It’s been a while for me,” she whispered apologetically into my shoulder.
THE ARROYO
I called in sick the entire week, partly to recover and partly to avoid all the questions on why my face looked like old hamburger meat. The pain got progressively worse with each day until about day three post the beating when it hurt even if I stood still. I couldn’t read because turning the page of a book required too much energy. I watched a lot of broadcast TV. Luckily network comedies weren’t funny because it hurt too much to laugh. I spent a lot of my time staring at the ceiling and wondering why I hadn’t heard from Cheli since that night she stayed over. She left me a casual note on the kitchen counter but that was the only contact we had.<
br />
“How was she?” Mike asked. “It doesn’t matter if she was terrible. Everyone is great after being with one woman for so long.”
Mike and I spread the printouts of Claire’s emails and pored over them for the better part of a morning. Mike logged each little detail on a legal pad which by the end was a manic scribble of names, arrows, and underlines. When he was finished he looked down at his work and tapped the big, bold letters that spelled “ARROYO.” Without looking me in the eyes he said, “Nice work, Chuck.”
For a man with few nice things to say about anyone and one who rarely, if ever, gave praise, those words meant a lot to me.
“Thanks,” I said a little too eagerly for he immediately reverted to his old self.
“Don’t go crowning your ass just yet. This is good information, well earned by the looks of your face, but it’s just a piece. A good piece, but a piece all the same.”
“Sure,” I said.
“It’s coming together,” he announced. “I knew a cop, an actual honest one if you can believe that, who used to tell me that the answer to any puzzle is always right in front of you. Everyone else is overly concerned with what’s missing. They waste hours trying to track down those bits that got lost from the box. What they don’t realize, he told me, is you don’t need them to see the big picture. He was a smart man,” he finished, and I knew he was talking about his father. “So we got the pieces. Now we have to put them together.”
“We have the name of the development, whatever it is going to be - an office building, a mall, a planned community — but we don’t really know where it will be built.”
“From your wife’s emails with McIntyre it seems they are having zoning issues in Lincoln Heights so we can assume it’s going in somewhere around there. It’s a shitty place to put in a mall but what do I know,” Mike added.
“We have a low-income housing development in the same area developed by Carmen Hernandez and paid for by the city via Councilman Abramian. I wonder if that’s where Valenti’s project is going.”
Smile Now, Cry Later (Chuck Restic Mystery Book 1) Page 12
