Christietown

by Susan Kandel

  “These are contracts, Cece. I’ve signed seventeen in the last four hours. Yesterday, before the police had even removed the crime-scene tape, I sold eleven Sittaford Two residences. The ones with the double garages!”

  Ian handed me my check and I walked back out to the car in a daze.

  He’d struck me as so benign, with his rashes and his splotches and his codswallop. But he was hardly that.

  I suddenly wondered how far he’d go to make Christietown a success.

  It’s not every girl who has an adept in the black art of high

  finance on speed dial.

  I had my accountant, Mr. Keshigian.

  His big blonde of a secretary answered the phone with a kittenish hello. When she realized it was me, however, she turned cool, pleading ignorance about her employer’s whereabouts. I knew, of course, that he was sitting on the other side of the wall, playing fast and loose with the tax code. She just wanted to keep her boss out of harm’s way—though anyone could see it was actually the other way around. I bullied her into putting him on.

  Before I could say a word, Mr. Keshigian delivered the news that the assets of any person serving prison time are frozen. “Not that it matters in your case,” he finished, “there not being any assets to speak of.”

  “Hold your horses,” I said. “I’m not going to prison. I’m just a witness. Not even.”

  “Look, my job is to make the information available, that’s all. You know I’m a big advocate of planning.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that. But that’s not why I’m calling you. I need to know everything you can tell me about Ian Christie— with whom you got me involved, remember?”

  “Ian Christie, Ian Christie,” he mused, ignoring the last part of my question. “Well, this is his first big project, this Christietown. And he was very impressive at the symposium, very impassioned. Talked a lot about his illustrious ancestor.

  She was made dame commander of the British Empire in 1971. Her books have been translated into over a hundred languages, and have sold in the billions. Billions! Like McDonald’s hamburgers! Lots and lots of money there.” Mr. Keshigian’s voice quieted to a hush.

  “Do you think he’s really related to Agatha Christie?” I asked.

  “Who knows and who cares? He’s funded for the next couple of years, and that’s what counts.”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “What happens to Ian Christie if nobody buys his houses?” How desperate was he? That was my real question.

  “It depends on how the deal was structured. If he got the money up front, which he probably did, nothing happens except that he doesn’t get any more.”

  “What about the developer, Dov Pick?”

  “Don’t mess with the Icepick.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  He sighed. “Dov Pick and his partner have a lot at stake. They’ve already shelled out the money to the builders, to the architect, the city, the permits, the lawyers, the water experts, the structural engineers. They’re in to the tune of millions. They’re the ones who really need to get their money out.”

  “Is there any reason to think they won’t?”

  “Hey, why don’t you develop some land and see if you can sell five hundred houses? It ain’t that easy.”

  “What I mean is, have you heard of any business-related issues they might be having?”

  “Nope.”

  “Personal crises?”

  “Nope.”

  I swear the big blonde was giggling in the background. They were conspiring against me. Mr. Keshigian put his hand over the receiver for a minute, then came back, saying, “Listen, everybody’s got problems. It’s a rule of thumb. If you look hard enough, you’re going to find ’em. I suggest you go through the business section of the Times with a fine-toothed comb.”

  “Great.”

  “Hey, I’m just an accountant. A lowly toiler. You’re the one with the creative gifts.”

  I expect the guys at the IRS would find Mr. K. a tad disingenuous.

  CHAPTER 15

  hen I got home, I made a pot of coffee and headed out to the office to do some research. I was looking for anything that might qualify as a red flag: bankruptcies, criminal investigations, mysterious fires, big insurance payouts, missing wives with family money. I didn’t need a conviction and/or hard time. Murky circumstances would be just fine.

  I shooed the cat off the top of the monitor and opened Google.

  First up was Ian Christie.

  Turned out there were lots of those guys.

  One Ian Christie was a film scholar in Australia with a particular interest in Peruvian cinema.

  Another was a life coach whose advice about mentoring struck me as extremely sound.

  Yet another Ian Christie lived in Milwaukee and hosted a local talk show entitled “Christie for the Mill,” which had been canceled recently. That Ian Christie had a blog and a vast number of hobbies.

  There were also MP3 downloads of several Ian Christie videos, sadly unavailable. The musical Ian Christie was an oboist and the surviving half of a pair of brothers from Manchester, England. I thought I’d hit pay dirt with him, but realized after reading his bio that he was too old by at least thirty years.

  My Ian Christie was a slippery devil.

  For a while there it looked like he’d managed to fly in under the radar, not counting all the Christietown hoo-ha, which relayed nothing compromising about the project and nothing whatsoever about its creator’s background, only the official party line that he was “very distantly related” to the lady in question (ha)—that, and a mention of his name among the attendees of the world Hemingway Conference in Cuba in 1999. I was pretty much ready to pack it in when something jumped out at me: an Ian Christie listed in the index of They Fly Through the Air, published in Britain in the 1970s.

  It was a history of the circus.

  I chewed on that one for a minute.

  Yes, I could imagine my Ian in a clown suit, with big red shoes. Or with a handlebar mustache, corralling folks over to see the bearded lady. I did a more detailed search. The author of They Fly Through the Air was a former ringmaster of a small traveling circus from Cheltenham, and for more than a decade, one Ian Christie had been his right-hand man. The latter was described as “jolly and ruddy and excellent at wringing a quid out of the balkiest granny.”

  It had to be the same one.

  My Ian was no murderer.

  My Ian was an old-fashioned hustler.

  Dov Pick was next. No, I’d save the best for last. Next was Dov’s silent partner, Avi Semel.

  Avi Semel migrated to Los Angeles in the early eighties. After reading an article citing the five most successful businesses to be in, he opened his first dry cleaner’s, Stars and Stripes, on Hollywood Boulevard. He hooked up with his wife—a customer, as well as an actress who played the sexy mom in a run of teen films—when he asked if he could post her head shot above the cash register. Four shops followed in quick succession, then he sold the lot of them when he partnered with Dov to form the SP Group, an “integrated, full-service real estate investor with in-house acquisition, development, finance, leasing, and management capabilities” (as per their Web site). No mention of any Mossad background. No intelligence collection and no paramilitary actions, unless you counted the divorce from the actress, the multimillion-dollar settlement, and the second marriage to the nanny. The last time he was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Avi said that his adopted country had been good to him.

  The same appeared to be true for Dov Pick, the fourth son of a podiatrist and a manicurist from Tel Aviv. Dov started off in the import/export business, which was vague enough to mean almost anything. Jeans? Hookah pipes? Automatic weapons? He hung around Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, schmoozing with the regulars while studying to become a real estate broker. Within a week of getting his license, he’d purchased the property next door, fondly
known as the minimall of death. Everybody thought he’d bought it for land value, but within the month he’d slapped on a coat of paint, planted fifty palm trees, and leased every last space. When he sold the mall two years later, he quintupled his initial investment. That was the Icepick for you.

  I read on.

  Now it was getting interesting.

  As it turned out, Christietown was peanuts to these guys. The big thing they had going was Dusk Ridge Ranch, a planned community in the hills west of Palmdale, which abutted Christietown to the east. Dusk Ridge Ranch had lain dormant since the original developer went into foreclosure, but Dov and Avi had negotiated with the lender to assume its debt and go forward.

  Seven thousand two hundred homes, along with parks, schools, and recreation facilities. It was practically a city.

  They’d broken ground last month. There was a nice picture in the Antelope Valley Press of Dov and Avi in hard hats sticking their shovels into a pile of dirt. There was also a Native American (not Joseph) waving something in their faces. The caption read “A tribal leader fanned sprigs of burning sage with his ceremonial eagle feather and blessed the dedication of the Dusk Ridge Ranch development.” The article was reprinted on someone’s blog under the heading, “Even the Injuns Done Sold Out.“ Many comments and questions followed.

  Nancyblueshoes@earthlink.net asked, “Are you sure that was a blessing going on?”

  Nineteenthhole@aol.com asked, “Is a golf course in the plans for Dusk Ridge Ranch?”

  Econmajor@ucla.edu asked, “Are all of the former pledges regarding infrastructure to be honored?”

  The latter struck me as a very good question, though I had no idea what it meant, much less what the answer was.

  So I did what any logical person would do. I called my exhusband’s fiancée’s mother for help.

  CHAPTER 16

  he next evening Dot was waiting for me outside her house, located on a quiet street in Glendale, a middle-class suburb just adjacent to the ritzier Pasadena. She was ready for action in a pink cashmere warm-up suit, pink terry-cloth headband, and pink sneakers. She matched her well-maintained, Tudor-style house, which was also pink.

  “Definitely your color,” I said, smiling.

  “You bet,” she said, pirouetting, which couldn’t have been easy with a hip replacement. “When I turned sixty, I swore off black. Would you mind, dear?” She gestured toward a small suitcase on wheels.

  “Oh, sure,” I said, grabbing the handle and dragging it down the front walk behind me. “What’s inside?”

  “Supplies.”

  “Supplies?” We stopped at the rear of my car.

  “Tools of the trade,” she replied gaily. “Reference materials. Laptop. Paper and pen. Tape recorder. Camera. Handcuffs.”

  Maybe I hadn’t quite explained things.

  “Also, a travel alarm, short-wave radio, and—”

  “May I interrupt for a moment, Dot?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tonight is actually supposed to be a lighthearted kind of event. Nobody’s going to solve any real crimes or apprehend any real criminals. I mean, it’s fine to bring your stuff if you really want to.” Why did I bother? Of course she was bringing her stuff. “But all that’s going to happen is that people are going to have a glass of sherry, get to know one another. I thought you’d enjoy it.”

  I’d also thought ferrying Dot to Christietown would give me one last excuse to snoop around. When I’d called Ian earlier in the afternoon with the news that I might have a prospective client for him—which was barely a white lie since Dot was planning to sell the Glendale house—he invited us both to the inaugural meeting of the Tuesday Night Club. God bless him, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  As I’d suspected, the same went for Dot.

  I hefted the suitcase into the trunk, and she slammed it closed. Off we headed into the sunset, admiring the plumes of fuchsia and orange streaking across the sky. Well, we would have if my windows hadn’t been so filthy. I turned on the windshield wipers and four tiny Japanese-made geysers sprayed water, then wiped it away.

  “Much better,” said Dot. “It’s important to know where you’re headed.”

  I hoped she hadn’t meant that metaphorically.

  Dot settled into her seat and pulled some knitting out of her bag, explaining that she was making a hat for Jackie’s cousin’s new baby boy. The yarn was pink, which suggested the extent of her obsession. We drove for a while in silence, broken only by the soft hum of the freeway and the click of knitting needles.

  The hat looked so small. Babies’ heads are in fact proportionately huge compared with adults’ heads. Little hands, though. Also feet. Also little toes, like kernels of corn. I was halfway to that trippy state of vehicular bliss—your mind and body have parted ways, though you’re still vaguely aware enough to contemplate baby parts at sixty-five miles per hour—when Dot asked how my new book was coming along.

  I crashed back into consciousness.

  Not a question I was prepared to answer.

  I tried to ask about her, but on that subject she was strangely mum. Instead, I got the unexpurgated story of Jackie’s cheer-leading triumphs, from her humble beginnings as a USC Song Girl to her two-year stint as an L.A. Rams cheerleader to the moment she eclipsed all other rivals to become the L.A. Clippers spirit captain, and, finally, director of the Seattle Sonics/Storm dance team. Naturally there were disappointments along the way; Jackie injured herself during tryouts for the Atlanta Falcons dance team when she was twenty-two and had to have emergency knee surgery, which she came out of with flying colors, thanks to a gifted surgeon and her own spectacular genetics. Two years ago, she’d opened a cheerleading camp for underprivileged youth in Chicago (motto: “Little Feet . . . Big Dreams”), but then she’d met Richard at an Art Institute of Chicago fund-raiser (Richard’s mother was a longtime docent) and abandoned all those little feet and their dreams—well, Dot didn’t put it precisely that way.

  Though I was loath to admit any common ground between Jackie and myself, I did find it interesting that she was a former cheerleader. And unrepentant about it. One look at her and you knew she had all her little outfits hanging in the front of her closet, cleaned and pressed so she could see the sequins and fringe every time she opened the door. Richard was insufferable on the subject of my teenage years on the pageant circuit. I’d always thought that if he had it to do over again, he’d choose somebody who wouldn’t know a spirit stick if it hit her over the head. I still remember the day he made me throw out the gold lamé dress I’d worn the night I twirled my baton on the stage of the Asbury Park Civic Center, took out a spotlight, and won the crown in spite of it. Why did we have to keep carting that thing around from apartment to apartment? he’d asked. It’s not like you even fit into it anymore. In those days, I didn’t have the nerve to question him. Poor Jackie.

  As I exited Highway 14, Dot powdered her nose in anticipation.

  “Are we there yet?” she asked, like a little kid.

  “This is it,” I answered, pulling into the lot.

  There were twinkling lights strung across the trees and under the eaves of the Vicarage. Ian’s theory was that holiday decorations, regardless of the time of year, provided people with subliminal encouragement to open their pocketbooks. Dot was unmoved by the colored lights, but when she saw the wooden sign with the hatchet-bearing biddy spinning around in the teacup, she let out a gasp. It made me feel a little guilty, but only until I realized I was actually doing her a service by saving her from having to spend yet another boring evening with Jackie and Richard.

  I convinced Dot to leave her suitcase in the car for the time being and we headed over to the Blue Boar. We were early, and only a handful of people were there. Some were standing close to the fireplace, which had a single Duraflame log in it. The rest were clustered around the large oak buffet.

  “Can I get you something, Dot?” I was impressed by the lavish spread.

  “Try one of those,�
�� said a burly older man clad in a green version of Dot’s warm-up suit. He gestured toward a platter of what looked like fried wontons. “They’re personal steak and kidney pies. Very authentic.”

  “Mmm,” said Dot, who downed one, then grabbed another. “Absolutely delicious! Oh, and look at those savories over there. They look so appetizing. I’m always amazed by what a sprig of parsley can do.”

  “Maybe I’ll try one of these.” I picked up a tiny ramekin filled with something I thought might be crème brûlée.

  Just then, Ian came over, making happy noises. “I’m so glad to see everyone tucking in. The stomach rules the mind, as Hercule Poirot tells us. Wouldn’t you agree, Cece, that food makes an event? Cece, are you all right? Doesn’t the soufflé au kipper agree with you?”

  “Love it,” I said, searching for something to wash away the vile taste in my mouth. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  I found the beverages and poured Diet Coke down my throat. I imagined the tiny bubbles irradiating the evil kippers.

  “Agatha loved good food,” Ian was saying when I reappeared with a glass of sherry for Dot. “Do you know that even when she was living in the Arabian desert in a tent with her second husband, she dressed for dinner? She imported Stilton cheese and chocolate truffles for her and Sir Mallowan to enjoy, and prevailed upon local cooks to produce éclairs with cream from water-buffalo milk and walnut soufflés cooked in a square tin can.”

  “According to her autobiography, Agatha had a very happy childhood, with no end of delicious treats,” added Dot. “She writes beautifully about the hot buns made by Cook, and the French plums that were always in a jar in Auntie-Grannie’s cupboard.”

  “The French plums,” exclaimed Ian. “Why yes!” He suddenly looked at Dot as if she herself were edible.

  “Stop that,” said Dot, sipping her sherry. “I’m here for the intellectual stimulation.”

  At her rebuff, Ian turned redder than usual. Then he remembered she was a potential client. He collected himself and approached the podium. After surveying the room, he clinked his glass a couple of times with a handy Christietown button. “Ahem! May I have everyone’s attention?”