I was surprised to learn that the affair didn’t begin while Claire and I were living together. It started a fair amount of time after the separation, but that only made me feel worse. Somehow it was less upsetting to know that Claire left me for someone else than to learn that she simply no longer wanted me.
I suddenly felt deflated. I passed on the idea of exiting through the skylight and just walked out the front door. The alarm wailed in the quiet night but luckily no one was interested in investigating the cause.
CHOLOS LIKE DOO-WOP
It was late by the time I got back to my apartment in Lincoln Heights. I’d stopped off at a burger joint in Hollywood just to be around people. I ordered a double cheeseburger with fries and a beer but only drank the beer. I ordered two more beers and then decided if I was going to get soused I might as well do it at home, where it was cheaper and I didn’t have to worry about a DUI checkpoint. I grabbed a bottle out of the refrigerator and decided to drink it right there in the kitchen and nearly downed most of it in the first few gulps. My neighbor was at it again.
I fell for you and I knew
The vision of your love-loveliness…
The old ones had a way of catching me off guard with their plaintive voices longing for that loved one who had left and gone or never showed up in the first place. And as if sensing my need to wallow in self-pity, this song was playing louder and deeper than normal. Then I noticed the back door was slightly ajar.
I rarely used that door, which led to the back alley and the building’s trash bins. As a single man who ate out almost every night, my trash generation had been reduced to junk mail and empty beer bottles. As such, my trips to the bins were infrequent. When I did make the occasional trip I most certainly locked the door after I came back. Although I’d grown to like my new neighborhood, I wasn’t so much in love to forget it was still a fairly dangerous part of town.
I stared at the thin sliver of black between the door and the frame and never felt so vulnerable to the night as I did at that moment. I took rapid, shortened breaths that felt like pure oxygen. My senses were on overload. The music thumped painfully in my ears, the chill of the bottle numbed my fingers, and the smells of ammonia from the kitchen and fried tortillas from the taquería on the corner made a sickening concoction that tickled high up in my throat.
I hoped and I pray that someday
I’ll be the vision of your hap-happiness…
Two fat fingers slipped around the jam and gently pushed the door open. I didn’t move. The thought to run never entered my mind. Even the instinctual need for a weapon, any weapon, never surfaced. A small knife was at an arm’s length from where I was, yet it remained in the drawer. I just stood there and watched. I watched the door inch open a third of the way and a pale, dead-looking face appeared, partly in shadow from the shaft of light thrown off by the overhead fixture. He stared at me with no emotion. It felt like an hour.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
The question shook him out of his daze, as if my voice reminded him of why he was there. He pushed the door all the way open, revealing two more men behind him. They were all in leather or dark shirts. They all had their heads shaved. I recognized one of them from the tire shop.
I was transfixed by the sheer terror of strangers entering a space they had no right to be in. I think I hunched over, because I clearly remembered seeing their shoes, even knowing how many laces there were. They came at me in a slow, powerful wave. I held out my arms to defend myself but was immediately thrown back against the refrigerator. I rained harmless blows on the back of one of the attackers. One of his partners easily corralled my arm and pinned it behind me. All three then stepped back, and I was surrounded in a tight half circle. The man with the dead eyes poked at me with his left hand as his right fist came arching in from the side.
I actually leaned in as his fist came crashing against my ear. A warm rush enveloped my body like being submerged in melted wax. I was still on my feet, though slightly hunched over. I reached out to my attackers with a gesture you use when looking for help getting back to your feet. They instead landed punch after punch on my head and neck. My legs felt like rubber bands and only the countertop held me upright. I felt my hair being tugged and then my face hit the linoleum floor. The kicking began, targeting my stomach, legs, and groin.
I entered a state between consciousness and unconsciousness in which I no longer felt the blows but still heard them—that fleshy sound made by blunt trauma on the human body. The initial fear of seeing these men enter the kitchen quickly dissipated, and I slipped into a perverse satisfaction at the thought of getting my ass handed to me. After over twenty years of fending off passive aggression, I was finally faced with the physical kind. And I was taking it.
These bastards could kick me all night if they wanted to, and although I knew the real pain would come later, in that moment, curled up as I was on the linoleum floor, I actually felt great.
The light hurt the most. I had managed to roll onto my back but couldn’t find the will to roll back to my side, where the pain hurt less and where the overhead fixture didn’t feel like those lamps at the dentist’s office. I draped my arm across my face and buried my eyes into the dark, soothing crook under the elbow. I lay there and listened to the labored breathing coming out of my lungs, which had its own lullaby effect. I counted the circles of light that danced on the inside of my eyelids. Just when I thought I had them all counted, they jumbled up and more were added and I had to start counting all over again.
“Jesus!” I heard a voice and then felt a pair of hands on me, this time to comfort, not to harm. They pulled back the arm covering my eyes. “Oh my God,” Cheli whispered at what must have been a frightening sight.
That damn light bore down into my head again. I tried to close my eyes but they were already narrowed to slits from the swelling.
“Can you shut off the light? It hurts my eyes,” I mumbled.
Cheli ignored me and took out her phone and started dialing.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting you an ambulance.”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
And then to prove it I somehow mustered the strength to pull myself to a seated position against the refrigerator. I slumped there with a hangdog look.
“See.”
Cheli reluctantly hung up the phone and sat on the floor next to me.
“You’re a mess.”
“Yup.”
“I told you to not get involved—”
I waved her off.
“No lectures. Please.”
I stared at the back door wide open to the night.
“I’m cold,” I said.
Cheli pulled at my arms.
“We’re going to the emergency room. If you don’t help me I will drag you there.”
“No,” I pleaded. “I don’t need to go to the emergency room. I want a hot shower,” I said with my head leaning against the refrigerator. “But I don’t think I can get there myself.”
Cheli dragged me to my feet, and I put most of my weight on her shoulder. I surmised my ribs were cracked from the pain every move and each breath caused. It felt like a ten-mile hike just to get to the bathroom. Cheli gently sat me down on the toilet, took off my shoes and socks, and ran the water in the tub. She helped me off with my shirt.
“Forget the pants,” I said, “just help me into the tub.”
I gingerly stepped into the tub and the first wave of hot water made me woozy and instantly tired. I didn’t think I had the strength to stand so I sat down in the tub and let the water rain down on me.
“Hotter, please,” I asked.
Cheli adjusted the temperature. “How does that feel?”
“It stings.”
When the boiler ran out of hot water, Cheli helped me back to my feet. I toweled off in the room clouded over with steam. She brought in a change of clothes and helped me get dressed. She led me to the bedroom and gently lowered me onto
the mattress. I protested but was asleep before I could even finish the sentence.
The music woke me up some time later. My neighbor was in a groove and deep into his collection of the slow and sad ones. I pulled myself upright and saw Cheli sitting by the window on a chair she had dragged in from the living room.
“My father used to play this song,” Cheli remarked. She had that expression of someone who had spent the last hour catching up with an old friend. She looked vulnerable and pretty.
“I never figured Latinos to be oldies fans.”
“Didn’t you know? Cholos like doo-wop. They get their girl and their beer and slow dance and reminisce about the old days. We Mexicans are a sentimental group.”
I watched Cheli drift off as the song came to its sad conclusion. There was a short pause and then it started all over again.
“Want to reminisce with me?” I asked and awkwardly got to my feet. I held out my arms.
“I think you should lie back down. You don’t look so good.”
“It hurts no matter what,” I explained. “It hurts to sit and it hurts to stand. And if that’s the case I might as well stand.”
“Okay,” she said and came to the center of the room. “I’ll teach you the cholo dance. Don’t worry, it doesn’t involve much moving.”
The cholo dance was a gentle rocking side to side with both arms pressed against my chest. “You have to point your thumbs up,” Cheli instructed. Once I was in the correct position, she wrapped her arms around my waist and rested her cheek on my shoulder. I was a little weak in the legs and leaned heavily on her. Cheli held me up with her arms. “Too tight?” she asked.
“No, it feels good.”
We stayed like that for three or four songs. I was dead tired but didn’t want it to stop. Eventually my neighbor gave up. He reached his limit and the endless loop gave way to the city sounds that were there all along and only resurfaced once the music stopped.
I pulled back a little to see Cheli’s face. Her eyes were swollen with tears. I didn’t know how long she had been crying but it appeared to have been for a while. She tried to bury her face in my chest, but I gently pulled her back up and kissed her on the cheek and tasted her tears. I kissed both her eyes and then her lips and held her as tightly as my body would allow.
THE ARROYO
I called in sick the entire week, partly to recover and partly to avoid all the questions about why my face looked like old hamburger meat. The pain got progressively worse with each day until about day three post-beating, when it hurt even if I stood still. I couldn’t read, because turning the page of a book required too much energy. I watched a lot of broadcast TV. It’s a good thing the network comedies weren’t funny, because it hurt too much to laugh.
Mike and I spread the printouts of Claire’s emails and pored over them for the better part of a morning. Mike logged each little detail on a legal pad, which by the end was a manic scribble of names, arrows, and underlines. When he was finished he looked down at his work and tapped the big, bold letters that spelled “ARROYO.” Without looking me in the eyes he said, “Nice work, Chuck.”
For a man with few nice things to say about anyone, those words meant a lot to me.
“Thanks,” I said a little too eagerly, for he immediately reverted to his old self.
“Don’t go crowning your ass just yet. This is good information, well earned by the looks of your face, but it’s just a piece. A good piece, but a piece all the same.”
“Sure,” I said.
“It’s coming together,” he announced. “I knew a cop, an actual honest one, if you can believe that, who used to tell me that the answer to any puzzle is always right in front of you. Everyone else is overly concerned with what’s missing. They waste hours trying to track down those bits that got lost from the box. What they don’t realize, he told me, is you don’t need them to see the big picture. He was a smart man”—and I knew he was talking about his father—“so we got the pieces. Now we have to put them together.”
“We have the name of the development, whatever it is going to be—an office building, a mall, a planned community—but we don’t really know where it will be built.”
“From your wife’s emails with McIntyre it seems they’re having zoning issues in Lincoln Heights, so we can assume it’s going in somewhere around there. It’s a shitty place to put in a mall, but what do I know.”
“We have a women’s center in the same area developed by Carmen Hernandez and paid for by the city via Councilman Abramian. I wonder if that’s where Valenti’s project is going.”
“People bend the rules in this city when it comes to development money,” said Mike, “but that seems a stretch to think Valenti could get this building under the guise of women’s center and then turn around and make one of his concept malls out of it. Though, remember what he did in Irvine when he got the city to donate some land as part of a wetlands conservation project and then turned around and built condos?
“The other big piece is this block of run-down buildings sold to that person named Salas,” he continued. “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’s history of questionable dealings has never included the rough stuff before, so it’s unlikely she’s behind it.”
“What about that guy who bought the block of buildings on Holcomb Street?”
“I put a full afternoon on that,” Mike replied bitterly. “Found nothing. Like he 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 aboveboard. 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 do Langford and your new girlfriend’s ex-husband fit in this?” Mike picked up on my look. “Yes, Chuck, I did some research on your lady friend.”
“You don’t trust anyone, do you?”
“Not really. How much do you know about him?”
“Only that he’s dead and he used to do business with Langford.”
“He went by the name Don even though his given name was something like Hector,” Mike said. “These guys all think changing their name to something Anglo will make them more money.” He laughed and then, to prove just how little he trusted people, he laid out a very detailed dossier of Cheli’s deceased husband.
Don started as a real estate agent out in San Bernardino County 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. 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 $150,000 profit. The money was so easy that there were always buyers. The more successful Don got, the farther west he moved.
He outgrew San Berdoo and gradually worked his way toward LA. He and Cheli rode that wave into a four-bedroom palazzo on a Los Feliz hillside. Everyone thought that wave would go on forever.
It’s different this time, they used to say.
“It’s never different,” Mike corrected.
One day everything worked, and then suddenly it stopped. And Don found himself, like most of those guys when the market crashed,, too far out
on the branch. Easy money and irrational exuberance are synonymous in the financial thesaurus.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“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 their home into a studio apartment in Echo Park, got all his affairs in order, and then shot himself.”
I recalled an early conversation with Cheli when she had bitterly told me that Ed took the easy way out with suicide. She might well have been talking about her husband.
“Remember what my father said—all the pieces are right in front of you. You just have to put them together.” Mike looked me in the eye. “Chuck, I’ll ask that next time you have a piece of the puzzle, you don’t withhold from me.”
“None of this sounds relevant.”
“Probably not, but the rule still applies.”
I was sufficiently chastened, but Mike wasn’t finished.
“How was she?” he asked as he gathered up his papers.
Although nothing had happened between Cheli and me, I didn’t appreciate the question.
“Is that part of the puzzle, too?”
“No, that’s just me checking in on a friend.”
Mike headed out the door my attackers had used to enter the apartment. He rubbed his hand on the casement they had jimmied open.
“Did you ever ask yourself how those thugs knew you lived here?”
I hadn’t. There were only a handful of people who knew the location of my apartment: 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 watching me wince as I stood 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.”
The Silent Second Page 12
