“Nice of you to come, Chuck,” said a smiling McIntyre who strode across the room to greet me. He squeezed my hand just to the point of the knuckles cracking and held it a quarter-second too long to make it feel genuine. He had the confidence of a man who could stare another in the eyes for a prolonged period and feel no awkwardness.
Todd McIntyre fit the part of the real estate development executive down to the open collar shirt and navy blazer they all seemed to wear. I checked to see if he was wearing socks with his loafers. Easy Mike said all men named Todd were jerk-offs and he defied you to think of an exception. Few won that game. It was if simply selecting that name for your baby predestined him to a life as a manipulative, whiny, self-serving brat.
“I wish we could meet under better circumstances,” he said plaintively, “but I thought it was important to get together and maybe talk over some of the issues between us.” He spoke like we were rival haberdashery owners getting together to discuss a price war on derbies that was hurting both our businesses.
“Where’s Mr. Valenti?”
“He’s on a call with Asia and will be joining us shortly.”
“Well, which issue should we start with? The business-related or the personal?” Despite my attempt to remain calm, I was already introducing tension into the conversation.
“Let’s start with the professional,” he laughed.
“So you want to know why I objected to the proposed zone change.”
“Do you have legitimate concerns with the proposal?”
“Define ‘legitimate’.” McIntyre let that one pass without commenting. “If legitimate means seeing that a power-broker with his fingers on the puppet and purse strings of this city doesn’t manipulate his way into yet another sweetheart deal, then yes, I do have legitimate concerns about the zone change.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t understand. We have done nothing improper in our support —”
“Come off it, McIntyre,” I interrupted. “You authored the proposal. Or, at least my wife did. You and Valenti are bending people over to get what you want. And that’s fine if you want to play these development games with your Cloverdale Club cronies, except this time it’s affecting the people down at the bottom, the ones who bring you the clean towel after the squash match.” It felt good to play the martyr and although tempting, I resisted the urge to use the phrase “blood on your hands.”
“I don’t understand that last reference.”
“The Arroyo,” I said. He studied me for a few moments. “Are you surprised I know about that?” Again he chose not to respond. “I know more about this project than you probably think.” I listed out some of the details to prove my point, including the shady dealings around Carmen Hernandez’s low-income housing project and The Deakins Building.
“We’re not building anything on those properties.”
“Then why the zone change that coincidentally happens to include two thin slivers where all those properties sit?”
“I will reiterate — we are not building anything on those properties.”
“Does the name Ed Vadaresian mean anything to you?”
McIntyre studied me like he was formulating the well-calculated response that wouldn’t come back to haunt him later.
“I’ve never met Mr. Vadaresian in person but we are linked through that property you mentioned, The Deakins Building.”
“You know he’s been missing for six months?”
“Yes, I heard that.”
I decided to gamble.
“And that Mr. Vadaresian called your office the day he disappeared.”
“Yes.”
That threw me.
“You knew that?”
“I spoke to Mr. Vadaresian.”
“What about?”
“I’m afraid I can’t discuss that.”
“Why not?” I asked. He was growing cagey, and I was growing frustrated with his quick, short responses. He added another.
“It’s improper.”
“Listen, Todd,” I said with extra emphasis on the name. “This man has been missing and no one seems to be able or willing to find him. His family is searching for answers and finding none. And then we find out that he called you the day he disappeared and you aren’t willing to discuss the details? Whatever business concern you have pales next to a man’s life. Maybe you should reconsider or I might be forced to involve the authorities in this.”
“Mr. Restic?”
I turned to see an elderly man with a shock of white hair approaching. Valenti was smaller than I imagined he would be. When images are formed through photographs in the media, people somehow take on the largeness of their personalities. Without the suit, he was just an elderly man with a warm smile and grey, watery eyes — someone you’d be happy to have as your grandfather.
“I was just about to explain to Mr. Restic that there is no need to involve the authorities —”
Valenti cut him off with a casual wave.
“Todd, maybe Mr. Restic and I could speak in private.”
McIntyre didn’t like being dismissed but he knew better than to challenge his boss. He didn’t get into that role by sharing his opinions too often. Once McIntyre had slinked out of the room to join the young minx in the hallway, Valenti turned his attention back to me.
“Thank you for taking the time to meet this late in the evening,” he said and motioned me to a set of white couches while he sat in a low-back chair. We sat for a few moments in silence, each man sizing the other up. Valenti came to his conclusion first.
“So this is the man who’s cost me money,” he said with a tinge of disbelief. For some reason I felt the need to apologize.
“My intention was never to cause you personal loss, Mr. Valenti.”
“And what was the intention, then?”
“Find justice for a friend,” I answered.
“I didn’t know you and Mr. Vadaresian were friends,” he replied. McIntyre clearly had done a very thorough job of briefing Valenti before our meeting. Men like him always wanted to be the one in the room with the most information. “Plus, I am not sure I see the connection between your friend’s disappearance and an insignificant zoning change.”
“If it was so insignificant, I don’t believe I would be here now.”
“Indeed.” Valenti shifted in his chair. “Let’s be frank with each other, if we may. I’ve always found that negotiations go a hell of a lot quicker when people are forthright.”
“I didn’t know we were negotiating.”
“Men are always negotiating,” he declared. “Let me start, to show my good faith. This is what I know about you. Recently separated from your wife of twelve years, having lost her to a younger and more successful man. Your career path, if charted on a line graph, would resemble a healthy spike twenty years ago and a relatively flat line since then. You have no children, no family in the city, deceased parents. You reluctantly do volunteer work and have no extracurricular obsessions like golf to occupy one’s free time. You have no real vices on any public record, you’re sensible enough with your money to know to buy an air conditioner in winter and Christmas decorations in summer. On the surface you are an upstanding citizen with a full life of relative comfort ahead of you. But underneath you are an incurably bored man desperately searching for some scrap of validation to paste on a very respectable, but anonymous, life.”
“Thank you, doctor,” I joked, failing to mask how much the assessment angered me. “How much do I owe you?”
“I’m sorry if this was too blunt. Now, it is your turn,” he said and settled deeper into his chair.
“I don’t like this game. Plus, I don’t know anything about you.”
“You must know something. Tell me what you know.”
“You’re wealthy.”
“Obviously.”
“Extremely wealthy,” I corrected. “The kind of wealth that buys a lot of influence.”
“We can debate that. But I will stop interrupting.”
“Thank you. You collect art, mostly American and by the looks of it mostly ugly. You tend to buy up-and-coming artists and thus create the market for their work. After all, if Valenti owns them they must be worth something. You keep threatening to build a museum with your collection but it has to be on your terms. There’s a pissing contest among the major metropolitan areas for who has the most culture. You exploit this by forcing the city to give you land leases for pennies on the dollar if you promise to let them pay for an elaborate building to house your private collection.” This elicited a smile from the old man. “Everything is a business to you, even philanthropy. You don’t give money away; you lord it over people. Nothing is free. Even the free money comes with some sort of barter to be collected at a future date. Life to you is one giant, evolving transaction where two sides negotiate and one comes out on top.” I paused for a moment. “That felt good,” I said truthfully.
“I told you it would,” he confirmed, showing little emotion. “I have one quibble, however, to what was otherwise an accurate summary. Business transactions are not a zero-sum-game. You made it sound like there are only winners and losers but for every deal you make both parties must gain something. It’s simple math. Otherwise you would quickly run out of business partners.”
“So who stood to gain by revising the city’s zones?”
“A lot of people stand to gain.”
“Ed Vadaresian didn’t. Bill Langford didn’t.”
“I can’t be held responsible for the actions of people trying to exploit the work we are doing. Let me ask you, would you hold the manufacturer of a butcher knife responsible for murder because a housewife got fed up with her abusive husband?”
“Your analogy doesn’t hold water when the people under your employ are involved.”
“No one on my staff had anything to do with those murders.”
“Who said Ed Vadaresian was murdered?”
Valenti paused. “I assumed some nefarious conclusion to Mr. Vadaresian’s disappearance, but you are correct, we cannot be certain he was murdered.”
“Why am I even up here?”
“Because you cost me money.”
“Whatever I cost you could be recouped by selling one of the lesser-known works of your lesser-known artists.”
“You’re missing the point that you yourself made about me. It’s about the money. I don’t like losing money, even if it is a nickel. Why would I keep working like I am? Lord knows I have enough money to keep me living the way I do for decades. Enough money for my daughter and granddaughter to live like this for their entire lives. I like making deals. And this deal is not going as I wanted it to.”
“Maybe this deal wasn’t meant to be.”
That got him to sit up.
“Mr. Restic, how can I persuade you to be more accommodating?”
“Why does that sound like a threat?”
“I didn’t make a fortune by threatening people,” he said. “I made it by making friends. I like to say, business relationships are like rabbits — they keep breeding new ones.”
“You must have quite a warren.”
“It’s a very productive bunch.”
“So you want to be friends,” I stated.
“I would enjoy that very much.”
“And what does this friendship involve?”
“One place to start is The Arroyo and this whole zoning disagreement. The other is with your acquaintance, Mr. Michael Wagner. I’d prefer he didn’t write the article but if he does, I would ask that he treat us fairly.”
“And what do I get?”
“An exit out of your humdrum existence,” he answered. “I want you to work for me. You could be very valuable to us and we in turn could provide equal worth to you.” As he spoke, I felt little pin-pricks on the back of my neck and shoulders and the tips of my fingers like the onset of an anxiety attack. I suddenly became very aware of my breathing and could taste my heart beating in my throat. Valenti paused to savor the discomfort his words were having on me. He pressed harder. “I know you want to break out of this life of yours. Prove to everyone and to yourself that you’re alive. And maybe in the process you win your wife back.”
I found myself out of the chair and back in front of the wall of windows. I just wanted out from under that little man’s gaze. I didn’t want him to see how much his words rattled me. Adjusting to the night outside, my eyes darted from one flicker of light to the next, searching for an anchor to slow this whirlpool of thoughts in my head. I could feel the coldness of the air outside coming through the glass.
“You’re on a treadmill, Chuck,” intoned the voice behind me. “All you have to do is step off.”
Below was the spectacle of a great city, unfolding its collective drama while I watched from the aquarium on the hill. Suspended in this airless room before the immensity of the night crystallized my insignificance. But with this realization came a soothing calm of acceptance.
“I don’t want to be your friend, Mr. Valenti,” I breathed into the glass.
CINDERBLOCKS
They found the car on a barren street in an industrial area in Southeast Los Angeles. There was little in the way of pedestrian traffic as the loft movement hadn’t quite reached that section of the city. The only activity was the huge rigs that moved in and out of the seemingly-endless grid of small warehouses. Easy Mike’s car stood unnoticed for nearly seventy-two hours, as did his lifeless body hunched over the center console.
A homeless man and aspiring thief finally alerted authorities. It took him most of the day to get a response because the few people he told either didn’t believe him or simply wanted to get far away from the smell of ammonia that permeated the air. Or both.
I got the call at work but was in the middle of a touch base with one of my direct reports and missed the call and had to listen to the message. I knew three words in that it was to be bad news.
“It’s Terry Ricohr.”
The fact that he used his first name meant something was wrong.
“What happened?” I whispered to the blinking red light.
“Mike Wagner has been killed,” the voice answered. “Please call me.” After a long pause, “I’m sorry.”
I drove down to the crime scene and parked in an open slot. I strode past a long line of angry truckers idling at the block’s entrance where two police cars formed a pincer to keep traffic from entering. The off-ramp from the I-10 freeway was one block over and they eagerly awaited the moment when they could dump their loads and head off on the next run.
Detective Ricohr met me at the end of the street and quietly alerted the patrolmen that I was a friend of the deceased. He led me down the street to Mike’s car. The driver’s side window was down, and even from this distance I could see the spray of black dots that covered the passenger side door.
“We just have a couple of questions for you.” Detective Ricohr motioned to another detective, a middle-aged Latino with a bushy mustache and pock-marked cheeks. The man pulled himself from a conversation with a forensics technician and sauntered over. “This is Detective Lopez.”
The man nodded and immediately broke into his questioning.
“How long have you known the deceased?”
“Almost ten years.”
“What’s your relationship?”
“Friends.”
“When’s the last time you saw the deceased?”
“Wednesday evening. He was at my apartment. He left around four o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Do you know where he was heading when he left?”
I explained the lead he’d gotten on the Holcomb Street properties, which then required me to explain all of the details surrounding the investigation that began with Ed’s disappearance.
“Yes, Detective Ricohr has filled me in on some of this.”
“Where were you between seven and ten in the evening?”
“I was with Carl Valenti at his residence.”
The detectives shared a
look.
“What were you meeting about?”
“He wanted me and Mike to stop meddling with a project he is working on. Maybe he just wanted to separate us.”
“Are you insinuating that Carl Valenti had a hand in this?”
“Insinuating isn’t a strong enough word.”
“Mr. Restic, have you ever known the deceased to use drugs?”
“Mike? No. The guy never even took aspirin.”
Detective Lopez made a few notes.
“Did he have any enemies that we should know about? He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in his column.”
“He told the truth,” I answered.
I detected a snicker from Detective Lopez.
“Is there an issue, Detective?”
“Excuse me?”
“You seemed to laugh just now.”
“Did I? I apologize. I meant nothing by it.” Detective Lopez didn’t seem very sorry. “We just need to follow up on leads that could have led to your friend’s murder. Unfortunately, this process can bring out the ugly side of people’s lives.”
“What ugly side?”
“We all have ugly sides.”
“Why don’t you enlighten me on Mike Wagner’s?” I challenged.
“Mr. Restic, I just deal with what I know and one of those things is your friend wasn’t exactly a popular guy in this town. He wrote a lot of things about a lot of people and some of the things he wrote people would say weren’t accurate. That tends to piss people off. Maybe he pissed off the wrong person.”
“Fuck you,” I calmly told him.
“Take it easy,” Detective Ricohr warned.
“No. I’m not going to let him throw this bullshit out there and take it lying down.”
“I’m only stating the facts,” countered Lopez.
Smile Now, Cry Later (Chuck Restic Mystery Book 1) Page 15
