I had called her to discuss the recent developments regarding the vouchers. That’s when she told me about the ceremony and that I should come and we could talk it over there. From my seat I could see Cheli beaming. I knew how much it meant to her. To stand among this group of men was probably more enjoyable to her than whatever medal she added to her curio cabinet.
The group of heroes was quickly shuttled off the field so the game could continue. I left my seat and headed back to the ramp. A few of the fans in attendance approached the officers and shook their hands. The public’s attitude towards the police was polarized — it was either unfaltering respect or abject hatred.
I hovered nearby to allow for more photographs and handshakes and pats on the back. I noticed an older Latina standing to my right. Dressed in a cheap dress and sandals, she patiently watched the proceedings. I found myself intrigued by this woman who clearly wasn’t here for the game and had no interest in what was going on out on the field. She flinched when the computer-generated clapping blared from speakers overhead. Each time she cupped both hands over her ears until it stopped. She looked like she was heading to a church social and probably was by the look of the bulge in her hand bag that probably contained a well-worn Bible.
The glad-handing show was nearly complete, and Cheli and I caught eyes. She smiled and waved me over. I gave her a quick hug and she took my arm and led me over to the older woman.
“Chuck, this is my mom, Efigenia.”
I studied her up close. She had dark, tired eyes and lids that struggled to stay open. She was in perpetual half-sleep. Her sandals were too small and the sides of her feet, heavily calloused from much walking, spilled over the sides. Her perfume smelled like the lobby of a convalescent home. There was a resemblance to Cheli somewhere in the color of her eyes and bump in her nose, but I always thought that was a trick our minds played on us. If told two strangers were sisters you’d find similarities between the two that didn’t exist.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said to the old woman. “You must be very proud of your daughter.”
Efigenia nodded and stood there quietly looking around at all the people. By the expression on her face this wasn’t a place she wanted to be. She clutched at her purse with both hands like it was her only worldly possession.
“Pretty good show out there,” I said to Cheli and flicked the medal on her lapel. “And a nice little piece of hardware.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Let’s go up to the Dodger Club. They are holding a reception for us.” We made a move towards the elevator, but Cheli’s mom didn’t follow. “Come on, Mom, there’s a party upstairs. They have a buffet.”
Efigenia stood her ground. She said something to Cheli in Spanish. I didn’t understand it but I could read the body language. Her mother wasn’t interested in the party.
“Just for a little bit. It will be fun,” she pleaded cheerily.
Again the woman responded in Spanish. What was communicated clearly irritated Cheli. She pursed her lips, trying to contain her frustration.
“I think he can manage to make his own dinner this one time,” Cheli told her.
The woman was immovable. Every plea in English was met with a Spanish dismissal and with each exchange Cheli grew more erratic and her mother more intractable, gripping that handbag harder and harder like it was a rescue line.
“This is great, Mom. Thanks for all the support. Just once you would think you could be there for me and share in my success. It’s okay,” she said brightly but failed to mask her true feelings, “It doesn’t bother me. It’s not like I’m missing anything that was there before. You see how it is,” she turned to me and spoke as if the old woman were no longer there. “Remember I told you about Latino families? You said all families are that way but seriously, can you imagine your own mother acting like this?” She laughed pathetically and I felt sorry for her. Her voice was at a pitch to draw the attention of those around us and the gawkers got a free show while they waited in line for their beer. “But what do you expect for someone who didn’t feel the need to come to her own daughter’s wedding. Everyone was too good for Don but nobody had any problem living in the house he paid for. No doubt El Principe didn’t have any issue sitting on his fat ass for free.”
Cheli reached a point of hysteria where resignation overrode any semblance of anger she felt towards her mother. Her voice got soft, quiet, almost sing-songy. “All these years, all the sacrifices, all the things I had to do.” She found her composure and managed a smile. “I am going to go upstairs and enjoy myself like I should. I can’t help if you don’t want to come.”
Cheli turned and joined a group of people heading upstairs to the party. I stayed behind as did her mother. The old woman loosened her grip on her purse and slowly headed for the exit. I gave her a few moments then followed her out the same gate. Playing over in my head was the same line, “All the things I had to do.”
* * *
I couldn’t risk trying to find my car in the expansive parking lot. If I did, there was no way I could loop back and locate Cheli’s mother. Near the gate’s exit, I spotted a line of town cars with their drivers whiling away the time. A lot of corporate guys hired cars to drive them to the game so they could get loaded and not have to worry about a DUI on the way home. I approached one of the drivers and offered him three hundred bucks to drive me. He was an older black man with watery eyes and a permanent sheen like skin fresh out of a hot shower.
“How long and how far?” he replied.
I told him I didn’t know but that if we didn’t make it back by the time the game was over I’d double his fee.
“Hop in,” he said.
I instructed the driver to follow Efigenia at a short distance. I didn’t know where her car was parked and didn’t want to lose her out of the several exits off the plateau. The driver was tickled with his assignment.
“Never did a tail job before,” he smiled.
The parking lot at Dodger Stadium was a blooming flower emanating from the bud of the ballpark. The various parking sections were layered on top of two arterial roads that ringed the stadium. The roads eventually led to the main stem that funneled cars inside from Sunset Boulevard.
“She park in the last row?” the driver asked out loud and soon got an answer. Efigenia limped her way across the hot asphalt towards the outer layer of parking sections marked by letters deep into the alphabet. But she didn’t stop there. She crossed the last section and continued on past the ticket booths and down the hill to Sunset. Three times she had to pause to catch her breath. The driver and I shared the same guilty feeling at watching an old woman struggle while we sat idly a safe distance behind her.
“This isn’t as much fun as I thought it would be,” he commented.
She waited at a bus stop on Sunset while we parked across the street from her. We sat there for nearly an hour before an express bus arrived.
“Let’s see where it takes us,” I instructed the driver.
We followed it through a numbing number of stops along Cesar Chavez before the express bus finally turned into its namesake and merged onto the freeway heading east out of the city towards San Bernardino. I placed a call to Detective Ricohr.
“You’re still at it?” he asked.
“As you are,” I told him.
Ricohr didn’t acknowledge that remark directly.
“Lots of loose ends on this one,” he admitted.
“I have an idea on tying some up.”
“Is that right?”
“But I need your help.”
I explained what I wanted him to do. He didn’t reject my request but he didn’t jump all over it either.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “You sure about this?”
I told him the truth. “I’m pretty sure.”
There was a long pause and then he said, “Good enough for me.”
I hung up and leaned my head against the seat and enjoyed the crisp chill of town car air conditioning. It felt l
ike it was going to be a long ride. Outside my window loped a landscape of relentless urban sprawl. Leaving Los Angeles by road robbed you of the satisfaction of escape. Unlike other cities, there was no light-switch moment on the way out of town when the urban chaos decisively converted into a suburban tranquility. The parts outside Los Angeles felt remarkably similar to the ones inside except the buildings perhaps had the luxury of being placed a foot or two further apart, which at seventy miles per hour was impossible to discern.
The bus led us into the Imperial Valley. To the north the San Bernardino Mountains loomed overhead through a pink-grey haze. Below was a flat expanse latticed with high-tension wires and concrete freeways. There was little natural shade in this area. Numerous times we crossed mile-wide gullies piled with boulders from the range above and now bleached bone-white in the relentless summer sun. Travelling deeper into the valley we started to see the developments.
From a distance, entire swaths of land were covered in a terracotta canopy, a result of the near-ubiquitous use of the same petroleum-engineered roofing tiles. The developments that blanketed the area rolled effortlessly from hill to hill and were corralled by high walls demarcating where the community ended and the virgin land began. Everything was washed in earth-tones — ochre and slate and sand — but there was nothing natural about it. Each development felt like it was manufactured elsewhere and plopped randomly in this random stretch of land.
The houses beyond the stucco walls were laid out with orange-grove symmetry and placed so tightly together that you and your neighbor could read off the same morning newspaper. All the homes had the same design: a two-story, 2,600-square foot manse comprising four bedrooms, two and a half baths, and an open-floor plan with the additional features of a two car garage, dual-paned windows, and double-hung doors. The original designer of these homes had a thing for even numbers. The names of the developments sounded Italian or Spanish, but were neither. They, as with every other element in the community, were designed to recall a Mediterranean Eden. The developers sold the bliss of the Southern European countryside to people who had never travelled further east than Las Vegas. The developments had just enough iron work, stone fountains, and gravel courtyards to evoke the atmosphere of a “villa” but without the risk of getting sued for false advertising.
The express bus pulled off the highway into one of the first developments in the area. A giant sign announcing the entrance to the Rialto spanned a four-lane road. Efigenia exited the bus and made her way through one of the small gates. We gave her some space then followed a safe distance behind her.
We crawled through the Tuscan-named streets and marveled at the emptiness. There were no children in sight and very little activity at all. For-sale signs outnumbered the homes without them. Every third driveway had a car parked in it. The rest were empty. Yellowing newspapers piled up on doorsteps because the owners hadn’t bothered to cancel their subscriptions. Lawns went unmowed and the desert hardscape crept out from underneath. They had kept the wild at bay with their towering walls but once the spigot was turned off, the land quickly reverted to its natural state.
This was the epicenter of the housing crisis. While Los Angeles took a haircut during the housing bust, San Bernardino took its cut at the knees. To the thousands of people who bought into that Mediterranean dream through the magic of no money down and the negative amortization mortgage, this was a hopeless proposition. The entire area was drowning in underwater mortgages. Even those few who still had jobs and could afford their monthly payments were facing twenty years of never recouping what they originally paid when they purchased the home. The bright ones just walked away, and so the vicious cycle continued.
Efigenia concluded her long journey at one of these nameless houses quite indistinguishable from the rest. She plodded up the walkway and went inside. I told the driver to pull over at the corner and instructed him to come back in twenty minutes. Before he could say anything, I gave him a hundred dollars to assuage his fear that all this had been one big swindle to get a free ride out to San Berdoo.
I gave it a few minutes before approaching the house. It was unnervingly quiet out there. The sun felt hotter than back in Los Angeles. I was already sweating and my arms began to itch in the heat. I rang the bell and anxiously waited on the front stoop. At last the front door opened and a middle-aged man blinked at me through the screen door.
“Mr. Salas?” I asked.
EL PRINCIPE AND HIS COURT
“Yeah?”
Cheli’s brother was about my height but with a pronounced pot belly and cheeks that were beginning to resemble jowls. He had a couple of old tattoos on his arms where the ink was bleeding into the skin and made it difficult to read the lettering.
“I work with your sister,” I told him.
“Oh yeah? You a cop, too?”
“No,” I laughed. “I’m not on the force. I do contract work with them. Anyway, Cheli was talking up this area. She said there’s a lot of homes you can buy up cheap so I thought I’d drive out here and check it out for myself.”
“Cheap, you don’t know cheap. Half this shit’s empty. It’s like a ghost town, man.”
“Yeah, it looks that way. How long have you lived here?”
“In this house?” he said and thought it over. “Not even a month. We’ve been bouncing around.”
“Is that right? Where were you before that?” I tried to keep it breezy and not make it feel like an inquisition.
“Let’s see. We were over in Covina for a few months then we had to get out of there. We stayed with some cousins for a while.” I remembered the night Mike was killed, the last thing he said was he wanted to check up on a lead out in Covina but wanted to wait until traffic died down. “Before that we had the back unit in Azusa after we lost the house in Rosemead.”
“That’s a lot of bouncing around.”
“No doubt. My sister and her crazy real estate deals. She always got something going and always got us moving somewhere. What she don’t understand is it’s hard on me and my mom. I take care of my mom. She’s getting old and needs the help, you know. I take her to the doctor and her appointments but it’s hard when we keep moving.”
“Sounds like she’s got a good son,” I said. He liked that. In his self-absorbed delusions, the Prince who had been taken care of all his life started to believe he was the caretaker. I wondered how the money worked. I was certain Cheli was the main source of funding for this household but wanted to confirm it. “Must be hard finding work out here,” I commiserated.
“Me, I’m on disability so I can’t really work. But it’s tough, bro. Money don’t go very far.” Far enough to buy this house, I thought. El Principe was looking more and more like a harmless rube, completely oblivious to the chaos going on around him. His name was on the deeds to properties that were at the root of four murders and he didn’t seem to know anything about it. “You know, an Armenian friend of mine was also talking about this area. His name is Temekian. Ardavan Temekian.” I waited for any kind of reaction. I got none. “Do you know him?”
“He doesn’t know any of them,” I heard a voice behind me.
Cheli stood on the walk. Her eyes were shielded behind dark shades. She still had the ribbon from the ceremony pinned to her lapel. In her other hand she casually held her gun by her side.
“Why are we all out here talking? Let’s all go inside,” she suggested. I didn’t have much of a choice. I quickly glanced down the street but didn’t see the town car.
“Where’s your car? Did you come with someone?”
“Yeah, but I don’t see him.”
She thought it over.
“Maybe he’ll show up later.”
We went inside and Cheli motioned for me to sit on the couch while she hung by the front door. The room was sparsely decorated. It didn’t look like they used more than two or three rooms in the house. There was nothing permanent about the space — no pictures on the walls, the TV haphazardly plopped on a couple of milk crate
s. There were still moving boxes stacked in the corner as if in anticipation of another frantic uprooting. From the other room came the sounds and smells of Efigenia preparing dinner.
“My mom’s making posole if you guys want to stay for dinner,” El Principe offered. The poor woman had barely gotten home before having to slave away in the kitchen.
“We’re fine,” Cheli answered.
El Principe wasn’t all that sharp but he quickly picked up on the tension between Cheli and me and quietly shuffled out of the room. As soon as he was gone, I turned to Cheli.
“Why did you kill them?”
Cheli gave me the once-over.
“Lift up your shirt and turn around,” she instructed. She wanted to make sure I wasn’t wearing a wire. I did as requested and sat back down. “How did you say you get out here?”
“I told you, someone drove me.”
“Who did?”
“I paid a town car service.”
“All the way out here? Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Cheli called out to her mother in the next room. Efigenia appeared in the doorway and wiped her hands with an old rag. Cheli spoke to her in Spanish, but her mother barely seemed to listen. The old woman kept wiping her hands with the rag despite the fact they were already dry. Cheli rattled off a string of instructions but the faster she spoke the more her mother began shaking her head. The old woman stared blankly at the soiled carpet. Whatever Cheli was pitching, Efigenia wanted no part of it.
“Listen to me for once,” she told her mother. “We have to get out of here!”
Efigenia finally had enough. She dismissed her daughter with a condescending wave of the towel and returned to the kitchen to finish dinner.
“They never get it,” Cheli ranted to herself. “Why am I the only one who tries to make things better? They just sit here and accept it as if this were all there was.” She gestured to the less-than-modest living room. “Like they don’t deserve better.”
Smile Now, Cry Later (Chuck Restic Mystery Book 1) Page 21
