Smile Now, Cry Later (Chuck Restic Mystery Book 1)

by Paul MacDonald

  “People bend the rules in this city when it comes to development money but that seems a stretch to think Valenti could get this building under the guise of low-income housing and then turn around and make one of his concept malls out of it instead. Though, remember what he did in Irvine where he got the city to donate some land as part of a wetlands conservation project and then he turned around and built condos on it.”

  “The other big piece is this block of run-down buildings sold to someone named Salas. The sales of these buildings were helped along by the thug Temekian.”

  “Who sent his boys over to push my face in.”

  “Did they say anything to you?”

  “I couldn’t hear anything over the punches.”

  Mike leaned back and studied the ceiling like there was an answer scrawled along it. “Nothing fits. It feels like it should but it doesn’t. Valenti is too big to be playing around with this small-time crook Temekian. And Carmen has too much at stake to be sticking her nose up at the city government that feeds her.”

  “What about that guy who bought the block of buildings on Holcomb Street? What’s his name again?”

  “Salas,” he replied with a hint of bitterness. “I put a full afternoon on that name. Nothing. Like this person doesn’t exist.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Buy property under a false name. Or a fake one?”

  “Since 9/11 they’ve cut down on the shenanigans. It used to be you could forge anyone’s name on a document but now everything is above board. I don’t see how he could do it, no matter how good Valenti is.”

  “They must have a social security number to file a return. Maybe if you —”

  “Don’t tell me what I should do,” he bristled. “I’ll find the bastard.” And to fully put me in my place, he added, “How does Langford and the ex-husband of your new girlfriend fit in this?” Mike picked up on my look. “Yes, Chuck, I did some research on your friend.”

  “You don’t trust anyone, do you?”

  “Not really. How much do you know about him?”

  “Only that he’s dead and used to do business with Langford.”

  “He went by the name Don even though his given name was something like Hector. These guys all think changing their name to something more Anglo will make them more money. Don wasn’t a bad choice — it sounds Caucasian but not so much to make it silly. Hector started as a real estate agent out in the Imperial Valley in the early part of the decade. He worked for one of the big firms but eventually got tired of sharing his commissions so he got his broker’s license and opened his own shop. That’s when he changed his name to Don and the market really took off. Everyone was flipping houses like they were trading cards. They’d use the money from a sale to buy more property, leverage it up with loans, do a shitty remodel and sell it for a hundred and fifty thousand dollar profit. The money was so easy that there were always buyers on the other end to take your property off your hands. The more successful he got, the further West he moved. He outgrew San Berdoo and gradually worked his way back towards LA. He and his wife rode that wave into a four bedroom palazzo on the hillside of Los Feliz. Everyone thought that wave would go on forever. ‘It’s different this time,’ they used to like to say. But it’s never different. Life has a way of reminding you of that truth every few years. One day everything worked and then suddenly it stopped. And Don found himself, like most of these guys, too far out on the branch when the market crashed. Easy money and irrational exuberance are synonyms in the financial thesaurus.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He lost everything — all his properties, all his homes, all his rentals, all his parents’ money, all his cousins’ money, all anyone who ever was foolish enough to invest with him’s money. He declared bankruptcy, moved out of his home into a studio apartment in Echo Park, got all his matters in order, and then shot himself.”

  I recalled an early conversation with Cheli when she bitterly told me that Ed took the easy way out with suicide. She might well have been talking about her former husband.

  “Remember what my father said — all the pieces are right in front of you. You just have to put them together. I’ll ask that next time you have a piece of the puzzle you don’t withhold it.”

  “I don’t think these are at all connected.”

  “Probably not, but the rule still applies.”

  I was sufficiently chastened. Mike gathered up his stuff and headed out, stopping by the door for one last question.

  “One thing,” he said with his hand on the door casement where my attackers had forced their way in, “Did you ever ask yourself the question how those thugs knew you lived here?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. There were only a handful of people who knew the location of my apartment in Lincoln Heights: Mike and Claire, Cheli, of course, maybe Paul Darbin if he snooped in my personnel file, and one other person.

  * * *

  Rafi got a lot of enjoyment at my condition. He particularly liked how I winced getting up out of the chair at the coffee shop on Glendale Boulevard. It still hurt to move all that much and I only got up to shake his hand.

  “I’m glad you find my suffering amusing,” I told him.

  “What does the other guy look like?”

  “Three other guys. And not a scratch on them unless you count the nicks they might have gotten on their knuckles as they pounded on me.”

  “So you think Temekian did this?”

  “I recognized one of his AP thugs.”

  “How do you know they were Armenian?”

  I shot him a look.

  “Did you tell anyone where I was living?” I asked.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Either inadvertently or not.”

  Rafi registered the implication in the last statement and he didn’t like it. “I haven’t seen him or spoke to him in weeks,” he answered tersely, “and I never gave no one your stupid address.” He was not only angry but also hurt by the accusation. I believed he was telling the truth. “What would they want with you anyway?”

  “Like I’ve said all along, they are wrapped up in something bad, something that involves your father’s disappearance, something that involves murder.”

  “Do you think they killed my father?” he asked, his face emotionless and unreadable. Throughout all the running around and all the events that kicked off when Ed disappeared, I’d lost sense of the basic tragedy in the whole situation, that there was a boy still struggling to figure out what happened to his father.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “That company that you and my dad work for, they do any kind of lawyer work?” he asked. I was amazed at how little he knew about his father and his line of work, though I had heard similar things with friends who were parents — your kids care about you up until around age eleven, then they stop and pick it back up in their mid-twenties.

  “Well, we have lawyers on staff but we aren’t a law firm. Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing, was just curious.”

  “It has to be something important or you wouldn’t have asked. Do you need legal help?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  “Did you get into trouble with the police?”

  “Just because I’m Armenian doesn’t mean I’m a gangster.”

  “Stop playing the martyr. You know that’s not what I meant.”

  He waited a while before continuing.

  “I think my grandfather is taking my dad’s money.”

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “He’s writing checks using my father’s money,” Rafi explained. He sounded contrite despite the fact that he hadn’t done anything wrong. It was as if he felt complicit in his grandfather’s actions.

  “Does your grandfather have authority to draw off your father’s accounts?”

  “I don’t think so. He met with some guy the other day at the house. I listened in from t
he kitchen. They were talking about that one building, the one down in Lincoln Heights.”

  “The Deakins?”

  “Yeah. They were trying to figure out a way to sell it without my dad’s approval. This guy sounded like some kind of expert. He said there were ways around it, that my dad didn’t actually have to sign over the documents.”

  “Can you describe this man?” I asked.

  Rafi gave me a description that fit the man I had spoken to from GVK properties, the man whose name I could never remember.

  “I am going to talk to your grandfather. This gentleman he was speaking with shouldn’t be trusted.”

  “Please don’t say anything. This is a family thing,” he explained, something among Armenians that needed to be settled among Armenians.

  “Well, I know some lawyers but none of them are Armenian.”

  “That’s okay. For that I want a white guy,” he laughed. “Will this lawyer need money? I mean, how much will it cost?”

  “Pro bono,” I lied. “They’ll work for free as a favor to me.”

  If I had told him that I would pay for their services, he would never have contacted them. He had a lot of pride for such a young man. We chatted a bit more, commenting on all the fancy cars parked in the lot and the fact that no one seemed to have a job that required they spend the better part of the afternoon at an office.

  “This is their office,” he explained.

  As I got up to leave, Rafi called out to me.

  “Hey. I never told him where you lived.”

  “I know you didn’t, Rafi.”

  “If it means anything,” he said, “Temekian usually hangs out at the bakery on the corner of Geneva and Harvard. Though I wouldn’t go strolling in there unless you want your face pushed in again.”

  I didn’t have to worry about that. By the time I arrived at the bakery the entire block was cordoned off by the Glendale P.D. All attention was on a nondescript storefront where the gaggle of police officers parted ways to let Cheli lead a handcuffed Ardavan Temekian to a waiting cruiser.

  WHAT’S IN A ZONE?

  “It’s a prescription drug scam. Temekian’s crew picks up homeless guys, usually vets, and drives them around to a handful of shady Armenian doctors in East Hollywood who then write out prescriptions, usually for Oxycodone. In one day the guy can collect up to ten prescriptions. Temekian pays off his runner then sells the pills on the street for around twenty bucks a pop. Most of the buyers shoot it or smoke it. It’s a pretty hard habit to kick,” Cheli added. “I’ve been on this one for seven months. We picked up one of the doctors on a statutory rape charge and got him to turn on Temekian. The man was pissed off when I told him how much those pills sold for. I guess he wasn’t getting paid that much.”

  We sat in my living room and ate noodles that Cheli grabbed in Chinatown on the way to my apartment. Although she seemed blasé about the case, I knew how much it meant to her. I saw it on her face as she walked through the details that led to Temekian’s arrest and I saw it on her face when she led him to the police cruiser the day prior. In that instance, she did it under the gaze of her male counterparts. Despite all the congratulations and smiles and back-slapping, there was deeply rooted envy as Cheli put Temekian in the backseat of the car. You could feel it in the way they watched her. I’m sure Cheli felt it, too. And I believed she loved every minute of it.

  “Did you question him about Ed’s disappearance? And those apartments on Holcomb Street?”

  “We will. Trust me, he’s not going anywhere. Hey, Chuck,” she shifted tone, “I’m sorry I’ve been sort of disconnected for a while.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been busy.” I gave her an easy out, but she didn’t take it.

  “Sure, there’s that. But it’s also a weird time for me. I haven’t really been with anyone since my husband passed. There’s a lot going on in my head and I just want you to be aware and maybe go easy on me.”

  She tried to laugh it off but failed to sell it convincingly. I grabbed her hand to let her know I was okay with whatever she needed from me. We spent the rest of the evening talking about random, meaningless stuff and eventually crawled into bed and fell asleep. She stayed through the night. The awkwardness of our conversation and the Spartan setting with the mattress on the floor made the whole thing feel like a college romance. This was a strange development for me, but I kept finding that the older I got, the more susceptible I was to adolescent and even child-like emotions.

  * * *

  She had her boots propped up on the coffee table, much to the annoyance of the receptionist a few feet away who was now going to have to clean any smudges off the glass. She also kept her call radio at a volume set for traffic noise and not the hushed tones of my office.

  “I got jobs to run,” Rosie said with obvious annoyance as I approached. She lounged next to a suited young man who sat erect with a portfolio placed perfectly on his knees. The shiny face and his constant patting dry of his handshake hand meant only one thing — he was here on an interview. “Here’s your package,” she said, but as I grabbed the padded envelope, she held tightly onto her end. With raised eyebrows she asked, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  I looked around nervously. The receptionist wasn’t watching us but I could tell she had her ear trained in our direction.

  “Will you take a check?” I asked.

  Rosie’s blank stare was my answer to that.

  “Let’s go down to the lobby.”

  As we got up to leave, Rosie patted the nervous fellow on the knee, “Good luck on the interview.”

  I went to the ATM and extracted Rosie’s payment.

  “Let me run up and make a copy,” I said.

  “I already did,” Rosie answered. “I made two copies.”

  “Why two?”

  “One for you and one for me in case any of this comes back to bite me in the ass.”

  A security guard came over to shoo away the riff-raff.

  “Miss,” he said, “you can’t have your bike on the premises.”

  I always wondered if part of the training for building security was to learn unnecessary vocabulary like “vacate” and “visual reconnaissance.” Before I could “assuage” the man’s concern, Rosie resolved it her way.

  “Fuck off,” she said and grabbed her bike and stepped on the escalator back down to Flower Street, much to the security guard’s consternation.

  Back in my office, I spread the contents of the package out on the table. It was a series of documents from the City of Los Angeles, Department of City Planning. There was a note stuck to one of the papers which I recognized as Claire’s writing. It said: “Final presentation for the Wed meeting.” They were mainly legal documents with enough jargon and legalese to make it read like a foreign language. Where the security guards had “premises,” lawyers had “pursuant.” It must have made them both feel special to be a part of a club that had its own language. Near the back of all this nonsense was something that caught my eye.

  It was a map of eastern Los Angeles crisscrossed with a dizzying array of shapes and colors that resembled a Jackson Pollock painting. The colors represented the various zones, sub-zones, overlay zones, and whatever-kind-of-zones that carved up the city — it looked like the plan of a schizophrenic. There was little logic to the patterns and even less to the color scheme. It was the result of decades’ worth of wrangling, manipulation, special interests, compromise, and bribery — the bastard child of a city conceived over a lust for land. And it was all about to change.

  Directly behind this map was a second one of the same area, only with some tweaks to the zones. Apparently Zone 8 was being revised. The original zone stretched from the upper middle class neighborhood of South Pasadena southwest to include parts of Highland Park and Montecito Heights before running up against the junction of the 110 and 5 freeways. The additions to this zone were two thin streams that dribbled south off hills of Montecito Heights down into Lincoln Heights where, by the time they ended, th
ey were no more than thin slits three blocks wide. I didn’t have to research the significance of this change because it was already abundantly clear — the revised zone would now include the blocks where Carmen Hernandez’s low-income housing project, The Deakins Building, and the forced-sale homes on Holcolm Street all resided.

  It appeared that there was some good old-fashioned gerrymandering going on with Claire and McIntyre and with Valenti undoubtedly manipulating the strings. What I didn’t know was why. There was apparently something to gain by manipulating zones, most certainly as it pertained to the building of a Valenti project, The Arroyo.

  I looked up the name of the official attached to the report. Timothy Carlson was Associate City Planner responsible for the metro east section of Los Angeles. A quick search on the internet brought up some interesting tidbits. Carlson was once employed by the mega-contractor Simons & Siefort, which was responsible for much of the development, along with Valenti, of the former farmland in and around the city of Irvine. Valenti eventually absorbed Simons & Siefort but it was unclear if Carlson made the transition with the purchase. He sat on the boards of several charities and a few corporations, including Signature Homes. That was one of the phone numbers Ed had called from the Resting Room. A quick search revealed that Signature Homes was the realty division of Valenti’s concept malls and fell under the group McIntyre controlled. They even shared offices.

  Carlson also appeared on a list of donors to the current mayor and if that wasn’t enough there were at least a dozen photos from the society pages showing Carlson and the mayor at charity functions. City Planners, I discovered, are appointed officials by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council. Councilman Abramian, the backer of Carmen’s low-income housing conversion, was Carlson’s main backer in the unanimous approval process.

  In a city founded and sustained by real estate and development, the Office of City Planning was a very influential group with little accountability. Their programs were funded by an ever-shrinking, taxpayer-funded budget and an ever-growing pool of development fees paid for by the area’s handful of mega-contractors. The influence of the city’s developers on policy was clearly growing. I called Mike to alert him to my discovery, but as I explained what I had learned on Carlson and the process behind the Office of City Planning, he interrupted me.