by C. D. Reiss
“Wet, cold, and amusingly liberal. I saw your picture in the paper,” he said to me. “You’re taking him back?”
“No.”
“She has other things on her mind,” Margie said.
“Such as?” He looked at me over the rim of his glass.
“Nothing.”
“She’s either writing a book or dating a mafia don,” Margie said.
I went cold and hot at the same time. I set my face so it betrayed nothing. If Margie or Jonathan had suspected anything, they would have noticed the two percent change in my demeanor, but they only knew what I’d told them.
“Top secret,” I said. “This doesn’t leave the table. Drazen pledge.”
“Pledge open,” Margie said.
“Pledged,” Jonathan agreed, holding up his hand lazily.
I dropped my voice. “Dan got some files on a certain crime organization from the NSA, and he’s having me look at them.”
Their reaction was immediate and definitive. Margie dropped her fork as if it was white hot. Jonathan picked up his whiskey glass, shaking his head.
“Is he trying to get you killed?” Jonathan asked.
“He needs to grow a set of fucking balls,” Margie added.
She tilted her head a little, as if checking to see if I was going to make a fuss about her language. She’d once verbally cornered me at Thanksgiving dinner, bullying me into describing why, which I couldn’t. Mom had begged her to stop, and Daddy had broken out laughing at my tears.
“Marge, really.” Jonathan tapped his phone. “It’s not that big a deal. He’s the DA. If he can’t protect her—”
But Margie continued undaunted. “Please, let me be the one to explain the obvious. If the mafia doesn’t come after you for looking into their books, whoever’s running against him will use you to undermine him. Think Hillary Clinton doing healthcare. Giving your disgraced ex-fiancé—”
“Thanks. I appreciate you defining me.”
“The press will do a fine job without me,” she said.
“Leave it to them then.”
I glanced at my brother. He was fully engaged with his phone, smiling as if the Dodgers had won the Series. I knew he’d heard everything but had no intention of stepping into rescue me.
“Is he trying to get you back?” Margie asked. “This is his plan?”
“This was fun.” Jonathan glanced up from his phone while still texting. “No, wait, we’re in pledge. This wasn’t fun at all.”
Part of being “in pledge” was secrecy partnered with honesty, no matter how hurtful.
Jonathan put down his phone and leaned into me. “Most things, Dad can save you from, and he will.”
“For a price,” Margie muttered into her glass.
“Right,” Jonathan continued. “But this? The mob? I don’t know. That’s big fish.”
Our food arrived: sour lemon salads and more wine than anyone should drink at noon on a workday. We leaned back and let the waiter serve us, laying down oversized white plates and offering ground black pepper. Margie and Jonathan started eating, and I smoothed a crease in the tablecloth. Everything looked washed out by the sun and fill lights, every corner and curve of my body visible.
“We don’t know if it’s organized crime,” I said. “Everything looks clean. Dan’s looking for something illegal.”
“I don’t like it,” Margie said.
“That’s because you hate Daniel,” I said.
“I was there. I saw what he did to you.” Margie speared salad and glanced at me, head not moving, expression bland and open. Her lawyer look.
“I think I found something,” I said. “But I’m not sure.”
“Proceed quietly.”
“I noticed some transactions. Real estate taxes. I followed the addresses to Mount Washington. The lots are grouped together in a really bad area. Fire sale prices.”
Jonathan plopped his phone down and leaned back in his chair.
“You look like you just ate a canary,” Margie said to him.
“I’m about to,” he said. “Now, Margaret, stop bullying her. You’re being bitter.”
“Fuck you.”
He turned to me. “Theresa, tell me about those buildings. Open permits? Zoning changes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Calls to the police about squatters? Still water?”
“I don’t know.”
“Complaints to Building and Safety?”
“Should I be making a list?”
He pushed his plate aside and put his elbows on the table. “If they’re warehousing property, they’d raze the structures to get rid of the reporting problems. Then they’d just build an ugly apartment building when they had the land they needed. But they’re keeping fire and liability traps standing. And that neighborhood... there’s no way some kids won’t use those buildings for business and burn the places down cooking meth.”
“Who the fuck cares?” Margie moaned.
“Real estate fraud isn’t covered under RICO, so they won’t be federally prosecuted if they get caught doing whatever they’re doing. You’d have mentioned that if you weren’t busy giving her a hard fucking time.”
“I’m trying to discourage her.”
“Something’s going on with those buildings, Theresa,” he said. “Get your man to figure out what it is.”
“Great idea.” Margie put her napkin on the table and stood. “Encourage her. I’m going to the ladies’. By the time I get back, I expect bullets through the window.”
We watched her stride across the room.
I sighed. “She thinks I’m made of sugar.” I pushed my salad around my plate. Jonathan didn’t say anything, and I didn’t realize he was staring at me until I looked up.
“What’s going on?” he asked as if he expected an answer. As if “nothing” wouldn’t cut it.
We knew each other too well. As kids, the eight of us had had the option of banding together or falling apart. As a result, the youngest and the oldest had wound into two cliques, held together on the spool of Margie.
“Is this your way of getting him back?” Jonathan said. “Keeping an eye on him?”
The silence between us became long and tense, but he wouldn’t give an inch. I thought Margie had gone to the bathroom in Peru.
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“Go on.”
“There’s someone else. I won’t talk about it more.”
“Ah.” He leaned back. “Use someone else as a threat, and then he tries to get you back with these books as an excuse? You’re a tactician. I forgot to thank you for your suggestion to bring a woman I wasn’t related to. Worked.”
“Really? Jessica came back? That’s amazing.”
“Yes, but I don’t want her. I’m keeping the new one. Unexpected upside.”
I was stunned into silence. He’d let go of something he’d been holding onto for a long time. “What happened to change your mind?”
“It was just gone. Whatever was there. Poof, gone. And for a while, too. Which is great, but neither of them is going to get me killed. You? You’re getting deep in shit.”
I didn’t want to say another word about it because I didn’t want to spin out of control. I just wanted to find out about Antonio without asking him questions.
“You speak Italian, right?” I said.
“Yes.”
He spoke everything. It was his gift.
“Come vuoi tu. What does that mean?”
“Kind of ‘as you wish,’ more or less. Why?”
“Pledge closed,” I said.
“Fine. Pledge closed.”
Margie came up behind us. “Closing pledge. Who wants coffee?”
twenty.
ike every other part of central and eastern Los Angeles, Mount Washington was facing a real estate renaissance. Yet that particular hill seemed to have been passed over. The commercial district was a row of empty storefronts with gates pulled shut, broken glass, some burned out, and most graf
fitied over. Five blocks of third-world devastation stretched in either direction. I turned left up the hill, cracked asphalt bouncing my little car. The sidewalks ended under deep, thorny underbrush. Even at nine in the morning, I heard the beats of someone’s music on the other side of the hill.
A right, then another left, and I found an eight-foot high chain-link fence stretched around a hairpin turn and up the hill. Across the street, another fence. The buildings were overgrown, unkempt, with peeling stucco and beams warped under the passion flower vines. When I opened my car door, an avocado with the squirrel-sized bite rolled down the hill with a skit skit skoot, popping up on a crack in the pavement and landing on the asphalt. I looked up. A cloud-high avocado tree shaded the block, spitting its bounty onto the sidewalk.
I shut the door. My car made a familiar chirp that alerted the neighborhood that something expensive was nearby. I glanced back at it then forward.
The late Frankie Giraldi had bought everything behind those fences, from what I could tell, but one house he’d bought first. He’d purchased it as an individual. Years later, his estate had moved it into trust and bought up everything around it.
The executor of the trust was the law firm of Mansiatti, Rowenstein, and Karo. Antonio Spinelli, Esq., LLP had bought them when they went belly up. They had one client: the Frank Giraldi estate. A snake eating itself. The estate’s trust owned the property, and Antonio managed the trust. Did he actually own it outright? I couldn’t tell from the papers I’d had in front of me.
The overgrowth detonated my allergies. I felt my sinuses swell and press against the bones of my face. A drip tickled the back of my nose. I checked my bag. Advil, tampons, wet wipes, and an empty tissue packet. Great. The tickle worked its way to the back of my throat. I put my hand in front of my mouth, checked to see if anyone was around, and made a very unladylike noise to scratch my throat as I walked down the block.
I found the house. I was allergic to just about everything growing around it.
I didn’t know what I’d expected, but there was nothing but a run down, bright yellow house with a fifty-foot front yard. An old Fiat was parked on top of rosebush stumps. Stacks of faded children’s toys pressed against the fence. Bars on the windows. A porch stacked with bags of leaves. The driveway had been kept clear though, which meant someone came in and out often enough to need a path. A few steps to the right, I saw muddy tire tracks from something bigger than a car.
The entrance to the drive had been chained shut. Though a hole had been cut in the fence at the next dilapidated house, it had been repaired with sharp twists of wire. I walked on a few feet and found a new opening.
I crawled through it. A thorny strand of brush found my stocking and gave it a good yank. I had an extra pair in the car, but I was still anxious about the drooping egg shape at my calf. Pushing past bamboo, bushes with sticky burrs, and tall weeds with yellow flowers that I knew tasted like broccoli, I came out into the end of the driveway, at the front end of the backyard.
The house had been built into a hill, so the backyard was at a slant, the square footage taken up by a slope that got more vertical as it bent away from the house. The structure itself was no surprise, with its beaten yellow paint and bent eaves. But the fence surprised me. Though the barriers from the street were old, hand-repaired chain link, the fences between the properties were new.
A loud crack echoed off the mountain. It could have been anything. A car backfiring. A piece of lumber snapping. Even a shotgun.
A smack of fear in my lower back sent me rushing through the bamboo and mustard weeds and through the hole in the fence, leaving behind strands of nylon for the thorns. I ran down the block and hurled myself at my car, almost twisting my ankle. The car blooped and I got in, turning the key before buckling. A drip of snot freed itself from my left sinus.
The car didn’t start.
Daniel’s voice bounced around my head, complaining that the car was unreliable, maintenance-heavy. He was right, and I was stuck on Mount Washington, turning my key repeatedly while nothing happened and a line of clear snot dropped down my lip.
My box of tissues was wedged under the passenger seat. Since I was stuck, and uncomfortable, and frustrated, I let go of the key and reached under the seat, rooting around for the feel of flat cardboard. I touched it and pushed, but a heavy iron pole got in the way. It was a security device called the Club that had been a big thing in the eighties, when the last owner had bought the car. Though I’d never used it, I kept it, even when it got in my damn way. I got the iron bar out and unbuckled my seatbelt. Leaning over, I curled my arm under the seat. The snot that had been sitting uncomfortably on my upper lip followed gravity. I shifted to get a look at what the box was caught on and yanked it free.
Clackclackclack
The sound of a ring rapping on the window. Too late to notice my skirt was hiked up, and I was showing full-on black garter belt to the world. I twisted to get a look at the guy standing over my car. He wore a neat striped shirt under a light windbreaker.
“You all right?” His voice was muffled through the glass.
I pulled my skirt down and sat up. “I’m fine.” I snapped the last tissue out of the box and wiped my nose quickly. I cranked down the window.
“This is a nice car.”
“Yeah, it won’t move.” I got a good look at him and recognized him by the bow lips. I held up a pointer finger and squinted, the universal sign for unreliable recognition.
“I thought I knew you,” he said. “How’s your sister?”
“Never better. Can you give me a push?”
“Sure. I know a garage down the street. They’re honest.”
There seemed to be red zones everywhere, so the garage was probably a good idea. “All right. I never got your name,” I said.
“Paulie. Paulie Patalano.”
“Nice to meet you again, Paulie.”
Another man got out of a car behind me. He had a low forehead and moustache.
“This is Lorenzo. He’s harmless,” Paulie said.
“Hey, Paulie.”
“Zo, this is Theresa. We’re giving her a push to East Side. Yeah?”
Zo agreed. They pushed, joking the entire time about horsepower, the division of thrust between them, and who got to direct traffic when we crossed Marmion Way onto Figueroa. I steered and wondered at the odds of meeting the bow-lipped man again. When one considered the actual mathematical odds, chance meetings were nearly impossible, yet they happened all the time.
And then, I wondered, what were the odds that Antonio was somewhere near his friend? Was he somehow behind any of this?
East Side Motors appeared a block away. A typical car repair dump, with a dirty yellow and black sign advertising that every car brand in the universe was a specialty, it looked no better than any other shop around. As we got closer, it became apparent that business was brisk. The lot was packed, and men in grey jumpsuits hustled around bumpers and grilles, moving cars, shouting, and laughing.
I turned in and was greeted by a balding guy with a chambray shirt and moustache. He opened the door as soon as I stopped.
“Ma’am,” he said, “we don’t do German cars.”
I looked up at the sign. What had looked like every brand in the universe was actually every brand in Italy. A quick glance around the lot revealed Maseratis, Ferraris, Alpha Romeos, but no German, Japanese, or American cars.
“It won’t turn over,” I said. “Could you hold it until I get a tow? I’ll pay for the storage.”
“You got it.” He turned to Paulie. “Sir? Are we charging?”
“No fucking way. She keeps it here as long as she needs to.” He held his hand to me. “Come on to the back.”
His manner was so friendly and professional, I thought nothing of following him. I thought I’d find coffee, a seat, a stale donut perhaps. But as I walked through the hustle of the lot into the dim garage, where everything looked dusted with grime, a man in a clean, dark yellow sweater and grey ja
cket looked up into the underbelly of an old Ducati, exposing the tautness of his throat. Such a vulnerable position, yet he held it with supreme confidence. Antonio. Another chance meeting that I was beginning to think had little to do with the natural laws of probability.
“Spin,” called Paulie from behind me.
When Antonio pulled his arms down from the Ducati, he saw me and seemed as surprised at my presence. I kept doing probabilities in my head, switching the numbers between him knowing and not knowing.
“Contessa?” he said, glancing at me then his friend.
“Up by l'uovo,” Paulie said.
A concerned look crossed Antonio’s face, but then it was gone with a nod and a smile. He snapped a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiped the engine grease off his fingers. Having erased reactions from my face my whole life, I knew exactly what he was doing. He was collecting himself from surprise.
“I got this, Pauls.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. We’ll be in the office,” Antonio said.
They stared at each other for a moment, then Paulie held out his hand. They shook on it.
“Benny!” Antonio called to a stocky man tapping at a smudged keyboard. “Friction plates, rubber, and rings, okay?”
“You got it, boss.”
Boss? Okay. Lawyer. Restaurateur. Mechanic.
“Come on.” He held out his hand for me.
I didn’t take it. I trusted him less and less as the minutes wore on. Antonio just turned and walked through a door, holding it open as he passed into a clean, sundrenched room with industrial grey carpet and car posters.
I followed him. Coffee had been set up for the people waiting and reading magazines. Behind a counter with phone banks and more magazines sat a woman in her fifties.
“Spin,” she said in a thick Italian accent, handing him a clipboard. “Sign please. I want to order the paint.”
He signed without looking and walked to another door marked “Private.”
I stopped. “I’m surprised to see you.”
“I have the same feeling.”
The middle-aged woman went about her business as if nothing was happening.
“You could have called if you wanted to see me,” he continued.
