“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.
Like 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 graffitied 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.