“Yes. And I’ve already lost time driving out here.”
We hadn’t seen each other in weeks and here was Claire buzzing around as if the desire to avoid the topic of our crumbling marriage was propelling her into a sort of perpetual motion. I just wanted to slow everything down.
“Claire, I’m asking for five minutes.”
“You’re going to the function tomorrow, right? We can talk then.” And like that, she flitted away without waiting for my reply.
ELYSIAN FIELDS
Charity is entertainment for rich people,” Easy Mike liked to say.
For five years I’d been on the board of El Sueño, a nonprofit that gave scholarships to collegebound Latinos. It was a worthy cause and an extremely rewarding experience. It provided a wonderful boost to my self-esteem as only the selfless donation of time to a noble cause can do. It was also a terrific résumé builder and a great venue to expand my circle of acquaintances. And the charity auctions at the museum and fundraising galas, like the one I was going to now, rivaled anything the entertainment industry put on, especially if a celebrity chef could be guilted into donating the appetizers. Somewhere down the list, after all the champagne distributors and flower vendors were paid, a handful of deserving students were cut checks to help pay for their books.
The success of a charity was often measured by the status of the people attached to it. I was a small fish when compared to the heavy hitters I rubbed elbows with. Of course, there was no bigger fish than Carl Valenti.
Valenti had attained a status in life at which he was widely known by just his last name. He made his fortune on land developments in Orange County, where he incorporated cities out of citrus groves and dug planned communities into the hillsides above them. At one time he owned nearly three-quarters of the city of Irvine and was the founding member of the Southland’s Eleven-Figure Club. Valenti had recently gained notoriety in Los Angeles for taking the Anytown USA feel of his suburban developments and translating it into “concept,” or themed shopping malls. His original mall, the Elysian, was the site of the charity event.
The Elysian sold nostalgia. Its architectural mélange of Cape Cod cottage, Georgian revival, Brooklyn brownstone, and Southern gothic was so inclusive that anyone who strolled through its lanes would inevitably recall some pleasant memory from their past and be overcome with a quiet yearning for home. I made my way through the main street, where an endless loop of jazz pumped from hidden speakers, as if everyone’s internal soundtracks were set to the cool rhythms of an Ella and Louis duet. Behind me a conductor cheerfully rang a brass bell to alert me that his replica streetcar was slowly approaching.
Everyone at the Elysian seemed to feel a sense of belonging. No one seemed to notice or care that the entire thing was an illusion: that the shutters shuttered blank walls; the wrought-iron balconies led to empty rooms, and the strings of garland overhead were made of plastic but sprayed with a chemical to make them smell like pine needles.
I presented my invitation at the entrance and was led into a giant tent that sparkled with champagne flutes and the bubbly notes of a live pianist. I looked around but didn’t see Claire and quietly cursed her under my breath.
Claire specialized in contract work for large commercial real estate firms. The past few years it had meant long hours in the office and longer hours schmoozing at events. The focus on a career was relatively new to Claire. What was once just a way to sound interesting at parties grew into something much more central to her life. While my career hit its zenith years ago with the invention of the Stoplight System, hers was just being born. My slow descent into apathy was paralleled by her enthusiastic rise to partner. Statisticians would say our career paths were inversely correlated.
It quickly became a source of tension between us.
Claire’s firm did a lot of the contract work for Valenti’s development arm, and as a partner, she had to nurture that relationship. I hadn’t realized it also involved nominating me for secretary of one of his hundreds of charities and sentencing me to two-hour board meetings every quarter. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one miffed at altruistic conscription.
“If he doesn’t deem it necessary to be present, why the hell am I here?” I overheard City Councilman Abramian grumble to his chief of staff.
The councilman and Valenti had an on-again, off-again relationship that rose and fell with Valenti’s new building projects and Abramian’s reelection campaigns. Abramian was very influential in zoning and development issues in Los Angeles. Almost all projects came through his desk, integrally linking him and Valenti. They took turns holding each other over a barrel, but in the end they always found a compromise in which both parties came out on top.
I ran into Bill Langford, the monogram-cuffed broker whose buyer had tried to acquire the Deakins Building, at the cheese table. He was surprised to see me.
“Are you involved with El Sueño?” he asked with a mouthful of smoked gouda.
“I’m secretary of the board.”
“Is that right?” he said, looking past my shoulder for the next person he could talk to. These events were for maximizing your connections, and I clearly didn’t rate on his list. I didn’t want to let him off so easily.
“So I followed up on that building you tried to purchase from Mr. Vadaresian. You were right.”
“Right about what?”
“A connection to the Armenian mob.”
“Is that so?” he answered in a disinterested fashion, still trying to move on to someone bigger and better.
I went into long, laborious detail of what I had found out and of my conversations with Detective Alvarado.
“Sure, I know Detective Alvarado,” he said, trying to hurry me along.
“You do? I don’t remember her mentioning you when we spoke.”
“Oh. Well, I knew her years ago.”
He then spotted someone and excused himself. Unfortunately for him the person he knew was my wife. Claire kissed him hello and immediately brought him back over to me to introduce us.
“Do you know my husband, Chuck? He’s secretary of the charity,” she said, trying to pass him off on me like a fisherman throwing back the trout that doesn’t meet the minimum size requirement.
“Yeah,” Langford bemoaned, “he was just telling me.”
“How do you guys know each other?” I asked.
“We’ve done business together,” she said, and left it at that just as the speeches were beginning. Langford took advantage of the pause in conversation to drift away.
Councilman Abramian stepped up to the podium and made a generic speech about the importance of the charity and dedication of all the people involved. There was a bit about the future of America and tomorrow’s leaders. It was a textbook stump speech—full of praise and entirely devoid of sincerity.
He then gave way to Carmen Hernandez, a local activist and, according to Easy Mike, one of the great shakedown artists of the twenty-first century. She read aloud a poem by one of last year’s scholarship recipients. Carmen stole her presentation style from Maya Angelou—over-enunciating random words and punctuating powerful phrases with dramatic pauses that were at least three seconds too long. Even the poem’s author squirmed. But the room was rapt with attention. They were, after all, paying for it.
Upon conclusion of the recital, Carmen invoked us to do our part and continue donating to provide a way out for young adults in need. She and Councilman Abramian beat it out of there as soon as their speeches were over. I should have followed them.
I tried to talk to Claire but she spent most of the night flitting around the tent, ducking into pockets of conversations long enough to get in a laugh but short enough to avoid any kind of meaningful discussions. The one pocket she consistently avoided was whichever one I happened to be in. I also noticed another pattern. Claire tended to find herself in the groups that contained a certain square-jawed, blue-eyed man who looked like he rowed crew at Princeton. Even his name—Todd Mc-Intyre—fit the profi
le. He was Valenti’s operations man and dynamo behind the concept malls. He was also someone I suspected Claire had secretly had a crush on for years. The way she laughed at his jokes you would think she was at a Friars Club roast.
Claire was certainly making something of herself. She was mingling with some of the city’s power brokers and she loved every minute of it. I realized late into our marriage that that had been her goal all along and the reason she moved west. Los Angeles’s secret sauce is that it allows people to be someone they couldn’t be back home. It’s a place where one can create the kind of large personality and oversize ego that’s unsustainable when surrounded by people who actually knew you and would call bullshit.
Claire grew up outside the Beltway with a K Street lawyer father and socialite mother, both functioning alcoholics and incredibly charming. Visiting their home was always entertaining, but it also filled me with a general feeling of inadequacy. Everything was perfect in that household, from the martini with the right amount of vermouth—none—to the level of discourse around the dining room table. They were the kind of people who would actually gather around the piano after dinner to sing show tunes. I’d stand off to the side and smile, nodding my head as I tried to hide the fact that I didn’t know the words to the songs. I realized I wasn’t alone.
Claire hated visiting her parents and would retreat into a sullen silence on those required holiday trips back east. It was a distinct contrast to the woman I knew and was immediately drawn to—that stylish girl, always talking, always laughing, and exuding a contagious level of confidence. But a lot of it was just a shell that quickly became apparent as soon as we set foot into her childhood home. In that house, there wasn’t enough room for three people on the stage. Claire had two choices—sulk in the corner or move somewhere else where she could do the one-act monologue and not have her lines stolen.
It was hard to pinpoint when things started to go south between us, but one day I simply didn’t feel comfortable in our house, and that was the first sign that we were in trouble. Not having kids was our biggest mistake. At a certain age, when the careers are on track and the parties and weekend getaways lose their spark, you find yourself looking for something to drive you.
“Transfer all your hopes and failures onto your kids to fulfill,” was how Easy Mike put it.
Our relationship felt hollow without the sacrifice of children. We filled our time at farmers’ markets and pickling parties and newly discovered restaurants with other childless people, namely Claire’s gay friends. On the surface all was going swimmingly well—we were still that fun husband-and-wife team—but under our feet the floor felt squishy, like we were standing on joists in the early stages of dry rot.
But with all our troubles and with every sign pointing to the obvious conclusion that there was no recovering what we once had, I still refused to believe it was over.
Then I saw Claire and McIntyre sucking face in the parking lot like two teenagers on prom night.
I ducked down behind a parked car so they wouldn’t see me. Why am I the one hiding? I thought to myself, but still didn’t get up from behind the car. I heard footsteps approaching and broke into a panic that I would be discovered. It turned out to be Langford again. This time, however, he didn’t run from me like the plague.
“Hey, um, I shouldn’t have told you that stuff,” he said. Langford lacked the swagger from earlier. He looked nervous and distracted, enough to not fully realize he was speaking to a man crouched on the dirty concrete in a parking garage.
“What stuff?”
“About the Deakins Building and that Ed guy.”
“You didn’t say anything inappropriate.”
“I shouldn’t betray my clients’ trust like that.”
“But he wasn’t your client,” I reminded him.
“All the same, it’s not professional.”
He lingered like there was more to tell. The longer he stalled, the less he resembled the rainmaking broker. He simply looked like a do-nothing man in an expensive suit.
“Does this have to do with Armenian Power?”
He stared at me for what seemed like an eternity.
“We should talk,” I said.
“Okay,” he agreed. “But I can’t now.”
I gave him my card with my cell number jotted on the back. I told him to call me so we could meet. He hurried off.
I called after him to ask if the coast was clear but he was too distracted to hear me.
HE’S GONE
Sometimes people in an emotional free fall precipitate their descent to the bottom so as to shorten the time it takes to return back to the surface. My feet touched bottom in Lincoln Heights.
Lincoln Heights was one of the first beachheads taken in the century-long campaign of suburban sprawl out of downtown Los Angeles. The original developers helped establish a formula that still works today: buy cheap farmland; get someone else (the government) to help pay for the trains and roads to get people to your land; sell the false promise of an Eden in the urban jungle; make a fortune.
The reign of this idyllic middle-class neighborhood, however, was short-lived. The relentless push to replicate the success of Lincoln Heights in other parts drew people farther out to the fringes of the city. Newly arrived immigrants filled the void, and one of the original suburbs of Los Angeles quickly became “undesirable.” The coup de grâce was an interstate freeway gashing through the heart of the neighborhood, splitting it in two. Once a destination, Lincoln Heights was now just a route to get you to that next hilltop that overlooks the chaos you’re escaping.
When Claire and I separated, I moved out of our Beachwood Canyon home and rented the bottom half of an old Victorian on a street close to the center of Lincoln Heights. Time had chipped away at the gingerbread trimmings, and the house was now a dusty box with bars on the windows and nothing to remind you of its former splendor. The only proof of a past, more grandiose life was the placard on the cornerstone that designated it a historic building. Most of Lincoln Heights sat in a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, but what they were trying to preserve wasn’t entirely clear.
Although I had the means and certainly the time to furnish the place, I never got around to it. I had one chair, a cheap coffee table, a lamp, and nothing on the walls. The bedroom set comprised a mattress on the floor and a stack of books on which sat a reading light. The night after the event at the Elysian, I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling while thinking about Claire and the incident in the garage, and how faint our whole marriage felt, like someone reminiscing about a long-ago wedding. What was something between the two of us now had a third participant, and the question of how long this person had been involved overran my thoughts. I tried to chase it away, but it was difficult in the silence. It wouldn’t be quiet for long. Almost on cue, the music started.
During the day Lincoln Heights was assaulted with the accordion sounds of norteño music or the violent ballads of narco-corridos, but at night it was all about the doo-wop. In what seemed like a daily ritual, an unseen neighbor would break the relative quiet of the street by playing one of the old, sad songs with their lyrics of longing and lost love. Tonight’s song was by the Chantels and had a heartbroken woman plaintively praying to win someone’s love back. It was slow and very loud, as if the speaker was sitting on the sill in my bedroom. When the song ended there was a long, silent pause. I heard a woman giggle somewhere outside my window. Then my neighbor did what he did every night—he played the same song over again. His cruelty knew no bounds.
I barely heard the buzzing over the music. I grabbed my pants and pulled out my phone. Not recognizing the number, I debated letting it go to voicemail but decided instead to answer as I didn’t have much else to do.
“Mr. Restic?”
“This is he,” I said, ever the grammarian at midnight.
“This is Detective Ricohr with the Los Angeles Police Department,” he said and paused to let that sink in. “Would you mind coming down to talk with
us?”
Cops had a way of making you feel guilty for things you didn’t do.
“Sure, what about?” I stammered.
“We’d just like to ask you some questions.”
“About?”
“About Bill Langford. He’s been murdered.”
It was a long-held belief that a direct correlation existed between the value of a neighborhood’s property and the police response time to a crime. Apparently, there was also a strong correlation to how quickly they remove a body, because by the time I arrived there was very little evidence that a crime had taken place except for the little yellow cones and a couple of police cruisers. All of the activity was behind Langford’s office in a narrow alley with barely enough room to park a compact car. Langford had managed to squeeze his Lexus SUV into the tiny space. The driver door was open and the window was shattered. I hovered behind the yellow tape with a few other gawkers. They were a chatty bunch, and in the short time I was there they’d figured out the entire thing.
“You don’t mess with them,” a scrawny kid with a voice that rattled fillings explained. “You know what I’m saying? You don’t mess with them,” he felt the need to repeat. The murmuring around him compelled him to continue. “You know how it is when you mess with professionals. There’s no talk.” He laughed. “There’s just action. That’s how they do it. Pop-pop,” he demonstrated, which drew a sermon-like agreement from his congregation.
I called the detective’s cell phone but he didn’t pick up. There were no uniformed officers near where we were standing, so I couldn’t alert them that I was there. And I certainly wasn’t going to dip under the yellow tape and find them.
“You see how they got him as he came out of the car?” the dishwasher-cum-forensics expert explained. “They was waiting for him. They knew he’d come this way so they was sitting there waiting for him. He pulls in and they come right up behind him—POW!”
“Where were you when it happened?” I asked in as official a voice as I could muster.
The Silent Second Page 5
