by J. R. Rain
Hmm. I call Corey, the higher-tier rep at Newvox, back; surprisingly, I get through to him.
“Quick question. Can you tell where the physical device is located?” As in, the VOIP device Haresh is using to make calls over the internet.
“Yeah, we can do that by its IP address. One moment.” The click of computer keys fills the silence. “Looks like the device is connected to an ISP in the Seattle area.”
“Great. Thanks. The warrant for the phone records should be coming back any day now.”
“Not a problem, Agent Moon. Whenever you’ve got it, just fax it in and I’ll help you out.”
“Will do.”
So… Mr. Kondapalli, and his VOIP device, are really in Washington. Well, as Chad would say, that’s a wild goose. Maybe I can find something in the paperwork. I pull the HUD application Rosa Melendez filed―this is so much easier now that everything is scanned into the computer as images. This job must’ve totally sucked ten years ago when they had to work with paper all the time. We’ve still got the original paper of course… somewhere downstairs.
I audit the hell out of it, but don’t notice any irregularities. With no better ideas, I pull up Shante Reed’s application, hoping to find something there. After poring over her paperwork for the next twenty minutes, my frustration level is about to send me running for an Advil. Argh. I hate knowing there’s something off but not being able to pinpoint it. Too many things feel wrong about this entire situation and―
The blur of digitized handwriting sharpens. Wait a minute… Is this Rosa’s application or Shante’s? I scroll back to the first page and find Shante’s name―but the handwriting looks the same. Scooting forward in my seat like an excited moviegoer, I minimize that window and pull up Rosa’s documents again. In a few seconds, I’ve got them side-by-side on my double-monitor display.
I’m sure the same person filled out both of these forms.
“Gotcha!” I say, a little too loud for the office. “Hey, Helling.”
Chad rolls back in his chair, sliding into view across the aisle. He must have forty identical sets of baggy white dress shirts and black pants. Today’s tie is blue and might be shaped like a Dalek. “Yo?”
“Since when do you say ‘yo?’”
He grins. “Since now I guess. What’s up?”
“Look at this and tell me what you see?” I point at my screen.
Chad gets up and walks over, trailing the smell of coffee and cinnamon.
“Those things will kill you,” I say since I can.
He quirks an eyebrow at me. “What, the cinnamon rolls?”
“They’re bigger than my son’s head, like 900 calories.”
“Calories are only bad if you sit in a chair all day.” He leans one hand on my desk, making it creak, and stares at the screen. His head sways back and forth between the monitors for a moment. “Nothing looks wrong.”
“You’re right. Not wrong, but is there something about them that’s unusual?”
I resist the urge to hum Jeopardy music while he studies the forms.
“Oh… hang on. Looks like the same writing, but two different applicants. Were these apps filed by an attorney? Maybe they hired the same advocate?”
“If an attorney filed this paperwork on their behalf, she or he didn’t sign as a preparer. That’s a red flag.”
He nods.
I pull up Kondapalli’s paperwork from five years ago. The handwriting’s the same there, too. “Check that out.”
Chad stands straight and whistles. “Nice. Finally got that fish you’ve been angling for to bite.”
“Something’s definitely not right here.”
I randomly select forty HUD-managed properties in our area and bring up their paperwork one after the next on my right monitor while leaving Rosa’s up on the left side for comparison.
“What are you doing?” asks Chad.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. If we tripped over three of these by chance, that means there’s gotta be dozens. I think I just found the rabbit hole.”
He walks back to his desk for a few seconds and returns. I peer up at him quizzically as he offers me two closed fists. Chad fights not to smile as he opens his hands, palm up, displaying a blue jellybean in his left hand and a red jellybean in his right, Matrix style.
I grab the red one and toss it in my mouth. “Oh, I’m definitely going to see how deep this rabbit hole goes.”
Chapter Eighteen
Inspections
A few hours later, I’ve got sixteen sets of paperwork stacked up on my desk, all filled out by the same person’s hand. The tenants don’t share any similarities though: men, women, young, old, and multiple ethnicities. About all they have in common is being in financial crisis. Time to follow up on a hunch. I give Nico a brief on what I’ve found so far, and he’s on board with us conducting a few quick inspections.
Our first two visits find locked doors and no answer to knocking or bell-ringing. It’s not terribly surprising given it being a little past two. At the third house, a shaggy-haired guy in a Hawaiian shirt shoots us a confrontational stare from a lawn chair. The paperwork says this guy’s a combat-wounded vet with a full ride from HUD since he can’t work due to his injuries. To look at him, I’d never think he’d been in the military. Long, curly brown-gray hair blends into a matching beard, he’s got a not-quite-aware-of-reality look in his eyes, and a belly by Budweiser.
“Whoa. Guess Nick Nolte’s fallen off the wagon hard,” says Chad.
I chuckle and hop out of the car.
The man’s surliness increases as I approach.
“Mr. Mark Beckwith?” I ask.
“I ain’t interested in whatever your sellin’. ‘Specially if yer one o’ them religious types.”
“No, Mr. Beckwith.” I hold up my ID. “I’m Agent Moon from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is my partner, Agent Helling.”
He scowls. “You fuckers did enough damage already. Leave me alone.”
Both my eyebrows go up. “I’m sorry. What did we do?”
Mr. Beckwith waves his beer around. “Damn government. Ya ripped my ass up already, took mah best years. Can’t get in the frickin’ door at the VA, and now ya all hasslin’ me ‘bout the damn house it took an act of Congress to get. Hell, you bastards would have let me rot in that damn refrigerator box forever.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that. If it was up to me, we’d take much better care of our veterans. We’re not here to give you a hard time, Mr. Beckwith. It’s just a routine property inspection, which your housing agreement mentions. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t policy. I’m sure everything’s just fine, but I’m required to check.”
He scowls. “Well, you g’won and look then. My ass is stayin’ right here. I’m done humpin’ around ‘cause the government says so.”
“Gulf War?” asks Chad.
Mr. Beckwith nods. “Yeah.”
While he reminisces about his time as a ground crewman for an A-10 squadron with Chad, I enter the residence to look around. Normally, these inspections are to check for compliance with the housing agreement. The usual stuff: not using the place for criminal activity, not subletting it, maintaining it in decent shape, and so on. While I doubt this guy’s a risk for anything except possible maintenance issues since his mobility’s pretty well impaired, I’m here chasing other things.
My first stop is the fridge, but he doesn’t have a ‘Marty card’ on display. It’s a little overreaching, but I pull open a few drawers to peek inside without disturbing the contents. Still no luck. A brief walkthrough of the rooms finds nothing out of place. The guy’s got so many empty beer cans in his living room that it looks like one of those plastic ball pits kids play in. Wow. It would be a whole afternoon project to unearth the place. Poor guy.
Poor me, too. No luck.
Chad and Mr. Beckwith are in an animated conversation when I return outside. Unfortunately, the tone of it is so aggressively racist against M
iddle Eastern people, Chad’s responses are all noncommittal noises and grunts. While I can’t agree with this guy, I understand how his life of constant, inescapable pain left him bitter beyond reason. Alas, we’re not here to pry open closed-mindedness.
“Mr. Beckwith?” I ask, leaping into a momentary break in his diatribe.
“Huh? Oh, you’re back. Find nothin’, right?”
I force a polite smile. “Again, I’m sorry for the bother. One question: Have you been approached by a maintenance man named Marty?”
“Nope.” Beckwith shakes his head, getting loud. “Ain’t no one approach me who got any sense left. Least of all my bitch of an ex-wife and that ungrateful boy.” He erupts in another tirade about how he went and ‘got his ass blown off’ by Muslims to protect this country, and now everyone thinks he’s a baby killer. “That boy o’ mine ought’a get his ass in a uniform. All you people don’t ‘preciate that freedom you got on account o’ men like me what bled for it. Not so much you, little miss, but this friend o’ yours here. You serve?”
Oh, this guy’s a graduate of charm school.
“I was still in school when Desert Storm happened, but I gave six years to the Army,” says Chad. “Military Police. Didn’t see combat though.”
“Well, that ain’t hardly your fault.” Mr. Beckwith mumbles incoherently to himself.
Eager to evade another rant, I thank him for his time and fast-walk back to the car.
“Wow,” says Chad, after getting in.
“Yeah. Wow is right.” I tap my fingers on the wheel. “I think he’s hiding something. You saw how he went off on his ex-wife when I asked about Marty. He wanted to change the subject.”
Chad shrugs. “Maybe. Didn’t want to press?”
“Not really. I don’t think he’s going to give up anything useful, not to mention I needed to get away from that rant before I said something unprofessional.”
“Can’t blame the guy. Radicals messed him up for life.”
I pull a U-turn onto the road, and drive back the way we came in. “All modern Germans are to blame for World War II.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Isn’t it? A small group doesn’t make up the mindset of an entire culture.”
He scratches at his eyebrow. “I didn’t say it’s right. I’m saying it makes sense he has that opinion. Bet you ask any World War II vet and they’d feel the same way about Germans.”
Shaking my head, I sigh. “That doesn’t make it right.”
Chad shrugs. “Where to now?”
I pat the stack of manila folders between us. “Pick one.”
Chapter Nineteen
Accessories
Our next contestant is Miss Naida Herrera, age twenty-two, who’s living in a HUD-managed property in the northwestern part of Anaheim.
Her home is in a dense suburban zone, where the houses are on the large side. The outside is beige, and it’s got an attached garage―grr, jealous―at a right angle to the building. Three windows flank the front door, two on the left, and a little Toyota SUV, probably ten years old, sits in a massive driveway that could hold three city buses parked abreast.
Damn, that’s a hell of a driveway, but I guess a concrete slab isn’t expensive to build. Then again, the place next door to the left also has a damn helipad for a driveway too, so maybe it’s the developer.
I pull up and park behind the Toyota. A young woman with medium-brown skin and thick, black hair peers at us from the leftmost window, tilting her head in confusion, watching us walk up to the door. Since she saw us, I don’t bother with the bell, and wait.
The inner door opens a moment later, revealing a young woman in a clingy white t-shirt and denim skirt on the other side of a white screen door. Seeing her barefoot along with the wash of cold air conditioning falling over me makes me shiver. A coo emanates from a tiny infant in her arms. The woman looks nervous, and a couple years younger than her file indicates―or this is her teenaged sister.
“Miss Naida Herrera?”
“Yes,” says the woman.
After I introduce us with a flash of a badge, her nervousness blooms into fear. It’s not so uncommon for people to react that way when the feds show up, so I try to speak in as calming a tone as possible, and give her the same spiel about routine inspections and I’m sure nothing’s out of place.
She nods and backs up, letting us in. I can’t resist the baby and spend a few minutes commenting on how cute she is. The infant’s too young to tell sex by looking, but the pink blanket’s a giveaway. This time, Chad does the walking around while I stay with Naida. Mostly, we talk mom stuff. When she hears I have two of my own, the ice breaks a little. I lapse into sharing some of the funnier moments that happened when they were teeny… like how after I gave a seven-month-old Anthony a bath in a little inflatable tub, I held him up to make silly faces at him, and he peed straight in my face.
Chad walks over to us with an ‘everything looks good’ expression, but he’s also holding a ‘Marty card’ between two fingers, which he points at me like a gun. “Place is spotless. Looks like there’s a man living here as well.”
Naida nods. “My husband.”
“Yeah, that’s on the file.” I take the card and show it to her. “Naida, what do you know about this guy?”
“He’s who we call if we need something fixed.” She shrinks in on herself, breaking eye contact.
Maybe it’s not necessarily feds this woman’s afraid of. She’s small and thin, could probably pass for being a teenager. I feel like Queen Maleficent being forceful with her, but I’m so close to finding a break I have to lean on her a little. Still, I don’t have to go straight to threatening her with losing her house.
“Naida, I need you to help me out here. Right now, you’re not in any legal trouble. If you’re not completely honest with me, that can change.”
Her eyes go wide. She bites her lower lip and her toes curl up.
I pull her packet out of the folder. “This is the application you filed for your HUD assistance.”
“Okay.” She makes a face at it. Either she’s illiterate or she’s never seen it before.
“This…” I take out Rosa’s. “Is someone else’s application. The handwriting on both of these forms is identical. That means the same person filled them out. No one signed it as a paid preparer, so either you’ve filled out a few dozen HUD applications under different names, or you know the person who did.”
Naida shakes her head. “I followed all the rules. We’re not doing anything against the law here.”
Tiny Luisa gets cranky, but calms down when her mother starts bouncing her.
“I’m willing to consider you unaware of what’s going on, but if you don’t help us, you may be committing conspiracy to defraud the government.”
Trembling, Naida looks down and half-whispers, “We followed all the rules. We’re only trying to survive and make an honest living. I’m… I don’t know why. Can you come back when my husband is home?”
Luisa erupts in a wailing fit. Who says kids can’t sense their mother’s emotional state. I don’t have it in me to badger a young mother cradling her infant. If I can find another tenant who caves in, and I confront Naida with that, I know she’ll crumble. I need her on our side, not feeling like she’s under attack by the government.
“All right,” I say. “What hours is he usually here?”
“After seven. He’s working with the telephone company. Up on poles.”
Hmm. That job usually pays fairly well, and it’s union. I leaf over their paperwork. It looks like they’re getting about 33% assistance, which lines up with the family income level. Nothing is glaring at me here other than her obvious fear when I mentioned Marty.
“We’ll be back later. If this Marty threatened you, we can help.”
“Oh,” says Chad. “We’d appreciate it if you didn’t call him and mention we’re looking for him. That’s a quick way to go from innocent victim to conspiracy charges.”
> Naida swallows. Hell, it might have even been a gulp.
I make a show of giving Chad a ‘that wasn’t nice’ stare. “Just relax, okay? We’re not looking to make your life difficult. My job is to help people in your situation.”
She offers a hesitant nod.
Something organized is going on here. In a few days, if I’m still spinning my wheels, I might have to rattle a saber at her. Maybe starting to arrest her would oil her jaw, but the screaming baby’s keeping me from going that far right now.
Naida stares mournfully at us from behind the screen door as we walk back to the car and hop in. She looks so much like a teen being abused by a family member, desperate to tell but terrified at the consequences, I’m tempted to hop out and try again. Before I can, she nudges the inner door closed.
“She’s being too careful. Someone threatened her.”
Chad nods. “Yeah. She’s terrified of something. Could be the gang, could be feds. She a citizen?”
“Uhh…” I shuffle papers, hunting for it. “Yeah. Grew up in Oildale.”
“Oof,” says Chad.
“What?” I ask.
“Not a lot of money out there. Place is a… mess. She’s probably suspicious of everyone with a badge.”
I drop the car in reverse, sigh, and back onto the street. “Who’s next?”
Chapter Twenty
Checkmate
Chad opens the next manila folder, but flips it closed. “How ‘bout lunch first?”
“Sure. Can we skip the side of bullets this time?”
He laughs. “Good plan.”
We wind up grabbing Chinese takeout. No one interrupts our break with unexpected gunfire, and afterward, we strike out at three more properties where no one’s home. Since it feels like we’re doing the wild goose chase bit two days in a row, I head back to the office. I could pull every HUD application processed in this area over the past three years, but that would take weeks. My best bet is to wait for that warrant and get the list of phone numbers calling in to Marty’s forwarding line, then compare those to our system.
