I’ve been threatened by better men than Lionel Coleman Jr.
Yes, Scott was in danger. Yes, Junior had a lot of money and pull. But I’ve found a lot of money that was stolen from powerful people and the odd government agency, and there are a lot of people who’ll return my calls.
Scott was transferred to a rehab wing of the California Medical Facility after four months of care. They gave him a partial denture and speech therapy to teach him how to use his remodeled jawbone. I visited him twice more in the hospital. We were never alone, not even for a minute. We were chaperoned by stone-faced guards who didn’t bother to hide the fact that they were eavesdropping on us. Most of our conversations ended when a burly nurse came in and sedated him. But I managed to slip him a note telling him what had happened and asking if he wanted me to keep running down Junior. The next time, he took my hand in both of his, looked deep into my eyes, and mouthed Yes.
I put out feelers. I called in favors. I made a dinner date with an investigator in the California AG’s office, a woman whose boyfriend had gotten involved with a low-rent exercise-equipment cult whose leader talked him into taking out a second mortgage and emptying out his retirement savings to buy inventory.
This is not a smart move, not for the boyfriend and not for the guru either. She might have let it lie if it had only been the boyfriend’s money, but he took out a bunch of credit cards in her name and maxed them out with the guru’s merchant account. Smart woman, foolish choices.
She was smart enough not to investigate it herself, but she had colleagues who were only too happy to convene a grand jury, subpoena the guru’s bank records and tax returns, and go to town on ’em. But the guru was better at funny accounting than he was at paying Vietnamese sweatshops to turn out Bowflex knockoffs. The overworked accountants at the AG’s office bounced off of them and didn’t have the time to tear them apart and build a crazy wall of red string and thumbtacks to peel open the guru’s nesting companies and trusts.
My investigator friend knew my work from a few cases where it had been useful in recovering some good people’s money from some bad people and she called me up: “Marty, there’s no twenty-five percent in this one. Whatever comes out of this guy, it’ll end up in escrow for his victims. I can’t just hand you a quarter of it. But this guy is a bad guy.”
“Send me the files,” I said. Some jobs you do for the money. Some jobs you do for the satisfaction, like pitting your wits against a crossword constructor. The guru was good at his job. I was better at mine. My friend owed me a favor.
She breezed into the Battery Club with a clatter of heels and a confident stride. Everyone else in the private club was a tech executive, or wanted to be, and dressed in studied casualness, signaling their wealth and ambition by choosing hoodies and tees that sold for a thousand dollars or more, but to the untrained eye could be conference swag.
By contrast, Michelle Reim looked like the hard-charging government lawyer she was: dressed in a smart suit that did not look expensive—judges and juries found it suspicious if public servants arrived in court wearing Prada. Her hair was styled but not aggressively so, no artfully mussed rock-’n’-roller do or studiously careless ponytail.
“Marty,” she said. “Let’s get a table.” The club wouldn’t admit me until she arrived, so I’d been cooling my heels in the plebs’ waiting room. Now she brought me inside the high-ceilinged room of well-fed, hungry people buzzing intensely at each other in overstuffed conversation areas or hammering at their keyboards while scowling at their screens.
We found a satellite room of dark blue walls and bookcases full of ornamental books, and she led me to a tiny table in a far corner. A server appeared a moment later and she ordered us both coffees and asked that we be left alone after they were delivered. The server—a poker-faced young Asian woman in a white shirt and green tie—didn’t bat an eye. The coffees materialized a moment later.
“Nice place,” I said.
She shrugged. “My husband joined.” I’d noticed the ring on her finger, a pure reflex. “He’s general counsel at a fintech company. The CEO is raising money from overseas investors and he wanted to be able to take them somewhere nice and he bought memberships for all the senior managers. I got in on the spousal package.”
I took in the surroundings: fanciful taxidermy, brass-accented globes, large “statement” abstract oils. “Remember when tech bros tried to impress investors with how cheap they were? I never thought I’d miss those sawhorse desks.”
She smiled. “They have those in their office. Ikea sells them as ready-mades: two sawhorses and a door for two hundred dollars. They take the investors to the office and show them how frugal they’re living, then they take them here and buy them hundred-and-fifty-dollar shots of Pappy van Winkle.”
“This is why I’ve never been a start-up guy,” I said. “I don’t have the cognitive capacity to reconcile those two signifiers.”
“It takes a special kind of person. But hell, irrationality is very big these days.”
We both paused for a moment. The 2016 campaign had been a roller coaster of high weirdness and low comedy, and the election itself was the surreal punch line. But of course, that was just for starters. The real fun had begun on inauguration day, with the “American carnage” speech and the bone-deep realization that we were in for four years of this stuff, and that it was going to get a lot worse before it got better.
“Well, that’s why I came to you,” I said. “Ordinarily when I find a grift like this one, crossing state lines and taking a couple of loops through offshore havens, I go to the feds. Somehow, I couldn’t feature Lindsey Graham getting too worked up about this one. And these guys are ripping off the State of California for tens of millions. Real money.
“I thought, okay, no point in trying the feds, but Xavier Becerra is an ambitious guy. I remember when he ran for mayor of LA. Lost it, sure, but then he did a decade and a half in Congress and came home to serve as the new California AG. They say AG stands for ‘aspiring governor,’ right? Busting open a big scam like this one feels like an opportunity for him.”
She was looking away, staring hard at a stuffed badger, face a mask. She sipped her coffee. “Marty, do you know who Trump’s tapped to run the Bureau of Prisons?”
“I confess I don’t. A lot of news these days, hard to keep up with it all.”
“This isn’t in the news yet, just on the grapevine. Trump’s top warden is a general whose most recent career accomplishment was running detainee operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.” She dropped her voice. “The guy’s a torturer, Marty. A sadist. A war criminal. They’re gonna put him in charge of the prisons.”
“Federal prisons.”
She shook her head sadly. “Yeah, this guy won’t have jurisdiction over the state pens, but you have to read the room here. There’s going to be so much bad stuff thrown at us for the next four years—ugly immigration stuff, all kinds of surveillance stuff, things that matter to lots of Californians, not just people in lockup and their families. Remember, four and a half million Californians voted for Trump, and there’s plenty more who like to see prisoners suffer. It’s supposed to be a punishment, after all.”
“But it’s not just that they’re suffering—they’re suffering while these guys take the California taxpayer for a ride. I’ve barely scratched the surface and I’m already at seven figures. Get me into their books and I’ll find plenty more.”
She was quiet for a long time. “Marty,” she said, barely a whisper, “drop it, okay? I’ve been testing the waters all week, ever since you first messaged me, and no one wants to take these guys on. Everyone was underwater before the election, and now they’ve got weights tied around their ankles. You’d need to add another zero to these guys’ take before anyone would take notice. No one wants to go out on a limb to help a bunch of convicts—”
“I told you, even if you don’t care about the prison conditions, they’re doing millions in fraud—”
“Honestly, Marty, it’s gotta be hundreds of millions before you’ll get priority on anyone’s queue in my office.” She sipped some coffee and put the cup down with a click. “I won’t pretend I hate this as much as you, but Marty, believe me when I say I hate it so much. We are living in a golden age of grift. We just put a guy in the White House who brags about his criminal acts, says they ‘make him smart.’
“People today, they think the government can’t do anything right, so they want the private sector to take it over. Then, when someone like these Thames Estuary people come along and start stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, those same people are like, ‘You see? I told you the government was incompetent!’ And then they slash my budget because I’m not doing enough to fight crime.” She shrugged, her thin shoulders slumping on the downswing into a dejected slouch. “They got us beat, Marty. That’s all there is to it. They got us beat.”
“Ouch,” I said.
She gave me a weak smile. “I like you, Marty. I like how methodical you are. Even more, I like how you care. I like that you believe.”
“You believe, too, Michelle. I know you do.”
“Yeah.” She sounded exhausted. “I believe. I care. But I gotta triage. You pick your jobs. I do, too. And when I take a job, I have to be able to make a case the AG can prove, otherwise I’m just wasting a lot of people’s time that could be spent building a case against someone else.”
“I hear you,” I said. I could tell this was a dead end, but I had to try. I hadn’t finished my coffee. “Michelle, I know for a fact that you don’t just take the easy cases. That’s what I like about you, you go after the big guys, even if it means you’re maybe going to lose a few. You want to make an impact, not put notches in your gun barrel. You aren’t afraid of an uphill battle. This is a fight worth fighting. These guys have more than a hundred thousand Californians at their mercy, and they’re torturing them.”
She got a cool look. “I thought you said the real issue was all the money they were stealing.”
“That’s the real issue for all the people you have to justify yourself to. But the real real issue? It’s all those poor motherfuckers who are absolutely in the power of these looting sadists. That’s why I care. I think it’s why you’ll care.”
She put a twenty down on the table next to her coffee cup. “It’s my treat,” she said. “You’re not wrong, Marty. It’s a human tragedy. It’s an outrage. But I’ve got more of those than I can handle. There’s stuff at the border—” She broke off. “Marty, believe me when I tell you that I have checked this out every way I can and I just can’t sell it. I can produce evidence but I can’t bring a case. A prosecutor has to do that, and they’re not home to your prisoners.”
Now she looked me in the eye. “It’s a disgusting mess, Marty. Thinking about it makes me want to crawl under the duvet and curl up into a ball. But I can’t, because I’ve got a full dance card, too, lots of people whose only hope of justice is for me to show up and do my job. So that’s what I’ve got to do. I’m really sorry about your friend. I’m even more sorry for the hundred thousand motherfuckers in California state pens. I’m even sorrier for their families. But I’ve got the wisdom to know the difference between things I can change and things I can’t, and I . . . just . . . can’t.”
I picked up the twenty and handed it back to her, put my own down. “I’ve got this,” I said. “I appreciate you doing all that, Michelle. I appreciate your taking the time to explain it to me. Most of all, I appreciate you doing what you can, for the people you can do it for.”
“Thank you, Marty,” she said.
“Thank you, Michelle.”
She had to walk me out—no guests in the club without their members—but we didn’t have anything else to say.
*
Between 1972 and 1978, Steve Soul (a.k.a. Stefon Magner) had a string of sixteen Billboard Hot 100 singles, one of which cracked the Top 10 and won him an appearance on Soul Train. He is largely forgotten today, except by hip-hop producers who prize his tracks as a source of deep, funky grooves. They sampled the hell out of him, not least because his rights were controlled by Inglewood Jams, a clearinghouse for obscure funk tracks that charged less than half of what the Big Three labels extracted for each sample license.
*
Yes, that Steve Soul. Yeah, he was pretty great. Not surprised you know his stuff. You’ve got excellent taste in music.
*
Even at that lower rate, those license payments would have set Stefon up for a comfortable retirement, especially when added to his Social Security and the disability check from Dodgers Stadium, where he cleaned floors for more than a decade before he fell down a beer-slicked bleacher and cracked two of his lumbar discs.
But Stefon didn’t get a dime. His former manager, Chuy Flores, forged his signature on a copyright assignment in 1976.
Stefon didn’t discover this fact until 1979, because Chuy kept cutting him royalty checks, even as Stefon’s band broke up and those royalties trickled off. In Stefon’s telling, the band broke up because the rest of the act—especially the three-piece rhythm section of two percussionists and a beautiful bass player with a natural afro and a wild, infectious hip-wiggle while she played—were too coked up to make it to rehearsal, making their performances into shambling wreckages and their studio sessions into vicious bickerfests. To hear the band tell of it, Stefon had bad LSD (“Lead Singer Disease”) and decided he didn’t need the rest of them.
One thing they all agreed on: there was no way Stefon would have signed over the band’s earnings to Chuy, who was little more than a glorified bookkeeper, with Stefon hustling all their bookings and even ordering taxis to his bandmates’ houses to make sure they showed up at the studio or the club on time.
Stefon remembered October of ’79 well. He’d been waiting with dread for the envelope from Chuy. The previous royalty check, in July, had been under $250. The previous quarter’s had been over $1,000. This quarter’s might have zero. Stefon needed the money. His 1972 Ford Galaxie needed a new transmission. He couldn’t keep driving it in first.
The envelope arrived late, the day before Halloween, and for a brief moment, Stefon was overcome by an incredible, unbelieving elation: Chuy’s laboriously typewritten royalty statement ended with the miraculous figure of $7,421.16. Seven thousand dollars! It was more than two years’ royalties, all in one go! He could fix the Galaxie’s transmission and get the ragtop patched, and still have money left over for his back rent, his bar tab, his child support, and a fine steak dinner, and even then, he’d end the month with money in his savings account.
But there was no check in the envelope. Stefon shook the envelope, carefully unfolded the royalty statement to ensure that there was no check stapled to its back, went downstairs to the apartment building lobby and rechecked his mailbox.
Finally, he called Chuy.
“Chuy, man, you forgot to put a check in the envelope.”
“I didn’t forget, Steve. Read the paperwork again. You gotta send me a check.”
“What the fuck? That’s not funny, Chuy.”
“I ain’t joking, Steve. I been advancing you royalties for more than three years, but you haven’t earned nothing new since then—no new recordings. I can’t afford to carry you no more.”
“Say what?”
Chuy explained it to him like he was a toddler. “Remember when you signed over your royalties to me in ’76? Every dime I’ve sent you since then was an advance on your future recordings, only you haven’t had none of those, so I’m cutting you off and calling in your note. I’m sorry, Steve, but I ain’t a charity. You don’t work, you don’t earn. This is America, brother. No free lunches.”
“After I did what in ’76?”
“Steve, in 1976 you signed over all your royalties to me. We agreed, man! I can’t believe you don’t remember this! You came over to my spot and I told you how it was and you said you needed money to cover the extra horns for the studio session on Fight Fire with Water. I told you I’d cover them and you’d sign over all your royalties to me.”
Stefon was briefly speechless. Chuy had paid the sidemen on that session, but that was because Chuy owed him a thousand bucks for a string of private parties they’d played for some of Chuy’s cronies. Chuy had been stiffing him for months and Stefon had agreed to swap the session fees for the horn players in exchange for wiping out the debt, which had been getting in the way of their professional relationship.
“Chuy, you know it didn’t happen that way. What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about when you signed over all your royalties to me. And you know what? I don’t like your tone. I’ve carried your ass for years now, sent you all that money out of my own pocket, and now you gotta pay up. My generosity’s run out. When you gonna send me a check?”
Of course, it was a gambit. It put Stefon on tilt, got him to say a lot of ill-advised things over the phone, which Chuy secretly recorded. It also prompted Stefon to take a swing at Chuy, which Chuy dived on, shamming that he’d had a soft-tissue injury in his neck, bringing suit for damages and pressing an aggravated-assault charge.
He dropped all that once Stefon agreed not to keep on with any claims about the forged signature; Stefon went on to become a good husband, a good father, and a hard worker. And if cleaning floors at Dodgers Stadium wasn’t what he’d dreamed of when he was headlining on Soul Train, at least he never missed a game, and his boy came most weekends and watched with him. Stefon’s supervisor didn’t care.
But the stolen royalties ate at him, especially when he started hearing his licks every time he turned on the radio. His voice, even. Chuy Flores had a fully paid-off three-bedroom in Eagle Rock and two cars and two ex-wives and three kids he was paying child support on, and Stefon sometimes drove past Chuy Flores’s house to look at his fancy palm trees all wrapped up in strings of Christmas lights and think about who paid for them.
It was on one of those drives where Stefon learned about copyright termination. It was 2011, and NPR was doing a story on the 1976 Copyright Act, passed the same year that was on the bottom of the document Chuy forged.
Under the ’76 act, artists acquired a “termination right”—that is, the power to cancel any copyright assignment after thirty-five years, even if they signed a contract promising to sign away their rights forever and a day (or until the copyright ran out, which was nearly the same thing).
Listening to a smart, assured lady law professor from UC Berkeley explaining how this termination thing worked, Stefon got a wild idea. He pulled over and found a stub of a pencil and the back of a parking-ticket envelope and wrote down the professor’s name when it was repeated at the end of the program. The next day he went to the Inglewood Public Library and got a reference librarian to teach him how to look up a UC Berkeley email address and he sent an email to the professor asking how he could terminate his copyright assignment.
He was pretty sure she wasn’t going to answer him, but she did, in less than a day. He got the email on his son’s smartphone and the boy helped him send a reply asking if he could call her. One thing led to another and two weeks later, he’d filed the paperwork with the U.S. Copyright Office, along with a check for one hundred dollars.
Time passed, and Stefon mostly forgot about his paperwork adventure with the Copyright Office, though every now and again he’d remember, think about that hundred dollars, and shake his head. Then, nearly a year later, there it was, in his mailbox: a letter saying that his copyright assignment had been canceled and his copyrights were his again. There was also a copy of a letter that had been sent to Chuy, explaining the same thing.
Stefon knew a lawyer—well, almost a lawyer, an ex–trumpet player who became a paralegal after one time subbing for Sly Stone’s usual guy, and then never getting another gig that good. He invited Jamal over for dinner and cooked his best pot roast and served it with good whiskey and then Jamal agreed to send a letter to Inglewood Jams, informing them that Chuy no longer controlled his copyrights and they had to deal with him direct from now on.
Stefon hand-delivered the letter the next day, wearing his good suit for reasons he couldn’t explain. The receptionist took it without a blink. He waited.
“Thank you,” she said, pointedly, glancing at the door.
“I can wait,” he said.
“For what?” She reminded him of his boy’s girlfriend, a sophomore a year younger than him. Both women projected a fierce message that they were done with everyone’s shit, especially shit from men, especially old men. He chose his words carefully.
“I don’t know, honestly.” He smiled shyly. He was a good-looking man, still. That smile had once beamed out of televisions all over America, from the Soul Train stage. “But ma’am, begging your pardon, that letter is about my music, which you all sell here. You sell a lot of it, and I want to talk that over with whoever is in charge of that business.”
She let down her guard by one minute increment. “You’ll want Mr. Gounder,” she said. “He’s not in today. Give me your phone number, I’ll have him call.”
He did, but Mr. Gounder didn’t call. He called back two days later, and the day after that, and the following Monday, and then he went back to the office. The receptionist who reminded him of his son’s girlfriend gave him a shocked look.
“Hello,” he said, and tried out that shy smile. “I wonder if I might see that Mr. Gounder.”
She grew visibly uncomfortable. “Mr. Gounder isn’t in today,” she lied.
“I see,” he said. “Will he be in tomorrow?”
“No,” she said.
“The day after?”
“No.” Softer.
“Is that Mr. Gounder of yours ever coming in?”
She sighed. “Mr. Gounder doesn’t want to speak with you, I’m sorry.”
The smile hadn’t worked, so he switched to the look he used to give his bandmates when they wouldn’t cooperate. “Maybe someone can tell me why?”
A door behind her had been open a crack; now it swung wide and a young man came out. He looked Hispanic, with a sharp fade and flashy sneakers, but he didn’t talk like a club kid or a hood rat—he sounded like a USC law student.
“Sir, if you have a claim you’d like Mr. Gounder to engage with, please have your attorney contact him directly.”
Stefon looked this kid up and down and up, tried and failed to catch the receptionist’s eye, and said, “Maybe I can talk this over with you. Are you someone in charge around here?”
“I’m Xavier Perez. I’m vice president for catalog development here. I don’t deal with legal claims, though. That’s strictly Mr. Gounder’s job. Please have your attorney put your query in writing and Mr. Gounder will be in touch as soon as is feasible.”
“I did have a lawyer write him a letter,” Stefon said. “I gave it to this young woman. Mr. Gounder hasn’t been in touch.”
Perez looked at the receptionist. “Did you receive a letter from this gentleman?”
She nodded, still not meeting Stefon’s eye. “I gave it to Mr. Gounder last week.”
Perez grinned, showing a gold tooth, and then, in his white, white voice, said, “There you have it. I’m sure Mr. Gounder will get back in touch with your counsel soon. Thank you for coming in today, Mr.—”
“Stefon Magner.” Stefon waited a moment, then said, for the first time in many years, “I used to perform under Steve Soul, though.”
Perez nodded briskly. He’d known that. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Magner.” Without waiting for a reply, he disappeared back into his office.
*
Stefon cooked Jamal another dinner and Jamal wrote another letter, this one more forceful, and addressed to Gounder by name. Two weeks later, Jamal wrote another letter without needing dinner because “that motherfucker went to Harvard fucking law”—Jamal had looked him up in the ALA directory—“and he knows you can’t make legal problems go away just by ignoring them. Time for that piece of shit to put on his big-boy pants and be a goddamned lawyer.”
The one thing Jamal wouldn’t do was file a lawsuit. “You need a lawyer for that,” he said. “I mean, I can help you with the paperwork, but a paralegal can’t file the suit. And you shouldn’t file your own suit, either. Those guys’ll just hire some blow-dried asshole from a big law firm and they’ll crush you like a cockroach.”
“Well, shit,” Stefon said. But it all made sense. Anyone doing business with Chuy Flores would do business like Chuy Flores—that is, crooked as hell.
“What you need is a contingency lawyer,” Jamal said. “Someone who’ll take the job for a piece of the action.”
Which is how Stefon ended up being represented by Benny Caetani II, son of Benedetto Caetani, who graduated at the top of his Yale class, won a string of spectacular class-action suits, then got disbarred after someone leaked calls where he admitted moving money from one client trust account into another to cover a shortfall. No one seriously thought that Benedetto was stealing anyone’s money—he’d had receivables due within a week that let him make the trust account whole—but he was also clearly guilty.
Equally, no one seriously believed that the high-powered surveillance that led to Benedetto’s downfall was random. Benedetto had transferred more than a hundred million dollars from the balance sheets of America’s largest, dirtiest corporations—poison-peddling pharma giants, toxic-waste-dumping chemical companies, a global chain of botox parlors with some very loose syringes indeed—and they were gunning for him.
Officially, Benedetto was out of the lawyer game. Unofficially, he was the brains behind Benny, and the two of them ran a squeaky-clean shop, making sure that everything that an actual lawyer had to do, Benny did—while Benedetto did everything else. Father and son got along well and they were a hell of a team. When Benedetto called me in to audit Inglewood Jams’ books, I jumped at the opportunity. They were a delight to work for.
“They played tough,” Benedetto said, as his minions arranged the bankers’ boxes on the steel kitchen shelves he’d had installed on the long walls of the storefront he’d rented for me to work out of for the month. “At first. Told me they didn’t owe Stefon a dime, and that they’d rather bankrupt themselves in court than pay some broken-down, washed-up disco king anything. Told me his problem was with Chuy, not Inglewood Jams.”
“Well, to be fair, that Chuy guy sounds like a class-A piece of shit.”
“A broke piece of shit. Guy’s got a million-dollar nose and an empty bank account.”
“So you had to go after Inglewood Jams.”
Benedetto twirled around in his Aeron chair. He’d sent over a pair of them, asking if I needed more, because he had a storage locker full of them that he’d gotten as part of a settlement with a broke Santa Monica crowdsourcing company that stiffed its workers when it folded.
“I did. I went after them. That Gounder lawyer tried to bluff, then when that didn’t work, he tried to dodge service. Which was such a kindergarten move. Plus he was no good at it. Caught him outside the rub-and-tug parlor he went to every Friday after work. Handed him the papers. Wore a bodycam. Didn’t mention his wife. Didn’t have to.”
“You think he settled because he didn’t want his wife to find out he was getting hand jobs at a massage parlor?”
“No, he held out awhile after that. But I could see it preying on him, every time I was face-to-face with him. Eventually, he musta told his bosses that they were gonna lose, and so they offered a settlement. It was trash. I laughed in his face. He tossed out some better offers, but none of them even in the ballpark of what we would get in court. Finally, I told him to get serious or send his court suit out to the dry cleaner’s. That’s when he offered to make Stefon whole and pay me a little for my trouble on top of things.”
I suppressed a snort. I was sure that a little on top amounted to some real folding money.
“Even then he tried to pull a fast one, told me he’d calculate Stefon’s royalties and send a check the next week. I was like, ‘Hold up, there is no way you’re going to be able to make an honest accounting for Stefon’s royalties in a week. The dude’s samples are in hundreds of songs. The mere fact that you claimed that you could come up with a fair amount in a week tells me you were planning to pull a lowball number out of your ass and pass it off as the audited total, so tell you what, I’m gonna get the best forensic accountant in the state of California to come down here to LA and crawl all over your papers, and you are going to send him everything he needs to do it, or we’re going to court, motherfucker.”
“And he agreed?”
“Hell no. He refused. We went to a preliminary hearing. Judge turned out to be a classic soul fan. It didn’t go well for Gounder or Inglewood. The next day, he was back in my office, and now, well, here we are.”
The last of the boxes had been shelved.
Benedetto rose from his chair. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said to the movers, and dug a roll of twenties out of his pocket and handed each of them two of their own. He turned to me as they filed out. “You wanna get sushi? The place next door is great.”
The empty storefront was in a down-at-heels strip mall in Eagle Rock. On one side, there was a Brazilian jujitsu studio that never seemed to have any students training in it. On the other side was Sushi Jiro, name on a faded sign with half its lightbulbs gone. Beyond that was a vaping store.
“The place next door is good?”
He laughed. “You San Francisco motherfuckers got terrible LA restaurant radar. Put Sushi Jiro in the Mission and it’d have a Michelin star and a six-month waiting list. Here it’s in a strip mall and only the locals know how good it is. Bet you never had a decent meal in this town, am I right?”
“I’ve had a few,” I said, “but I admit my track record isn’t great.”
“Let’s improve it.”
The sushi was amazing.
*
Inglewood Jams had the kind of books that were performatively bad, designed to foil any attempt at human comprehension.
But whoever cooked them was an amateur, someone who mistook complexity for obfuscation. Like cross-referencing was a species of transcendentally esoteric sorcery. I don’t mind cross-referencing. It’s meditative, like playing solitaire. I had Benedetto send over some colored post-it tabs and a big photocopier with an automatic feeder and I started making piles.
One night, I worked later than I planned. Sushi Jiro was becoming a serious hazard to my waistline and my sleep-debt, because when your dinner break is ten yards and two doors away from your desk, it’s just too damned easy to get back to work after dinner.
That night, I’d fallen into a cross-referencing reverie, and before I knew it, it was 2 a.m., my lower back was groaning, and my eyes were stinging.
I straightened, groaned, and slid my laptop into my bag. I found my keys and unlocked the door. The storefront was covered with brown butcher’s paper, but it didn’t go all the way to the edge. I had just a moment to sleepily note that there was some movement visible through the crack in the paper over the glass door when it came flying back toward me, bouncing off my toe, mostly, and my nose, a little. I put my one hand to my face as I instinctively threw myself into the door to close it again.
I was too late and too tired. A strong shoulder on the other side of the doorframe pushed it open and I stumbled back, and then the guy was on me, the door sighing shut behind him on its gas lift as he bore me to the ground and straddled my chest, a move he undertook with the ease of much practice. He pinned my arms under his knees and then gave me a couple of hard hits, one to the jaw, one to the nose.
My lip and nose were bleeding freely and my head was ringing from the hits and from getting smacked into the carpet tiles over concrete when I went down backward. I struggled—to free my arms, to buck off my attacker, to focus on him.
He was a beefy white guy in his late fifties, with watery dark eyes and a patchy shave that showed gray mixed in with his dark stubble. As he raised his fist for another blow, I saw that he was wearing a big class ring. A minute later, that ring opened my cheek, just under the orbit of my eye.
Apart from some involuntary animal grunts, I hadn’t made a sound. Now I did. “Ow!” I shouted. “Shit!” I shouted. “Stop!” I shouted.
He split my lip again. I bucked hard but I couldn’t budge him. He had a double chin, a gut, and he was strong, and used that bulk to back up his strength. It was like trying to free myself from under a boulder. That kept punching me in the face.
The strip mall would be deserted. Everything was closed, even the vaping store.
Shouting wouldn’t help. I did it anyway. He shut my mouth for me with a left. I gagged on blood.
He took a break from punching me in the face, then. I think he was tired. His chest heaved, and he wiped sweat off his lip with the back of his hand, leaving behind a streaky mustache of my blood.
He contemplated me, weighing me up. I thought maybe he was trying to decide if I had any fight left in me, or perhaps whether I had any valuables he could help himself to.
He cleared his throat and looked at me again. “Goddammit, I messed your face up so bad I can’t tell for sure. I hope to fuck that you’re Martin Hench, though.”
Even with my addled wits, this was an important piece of intelligence: he came here for me. This wasn’t a random act of senseless Los Angeles street violence. This was aimed at me.
I was briefly angry at Benedetto for not warning me that Chuy Flores was such a tough son of a bitch. Then I had the presence of mind to lie.
“I don’t know who the fuck this Mark Hendricks is.” My voice was thick with gargled blood, but I was proud of Mark Hendricks. Pretty fast thinking for a guy with a probable concussion.
The guy slapped me open-handed across the face, and as I lay dazed for a moment, he shifted, reached into my back pocket for my wallet, and yanked it—and the seat of my pants—free. Before I could react, his knees were back on my biceps, pinning my arms and shoulders. It was a very neat move, and fast for an old guy like him.
He flipped my wallet open and squinted at it, then held it at arm’s length, then smiled broadly. He had bleach-white teeth, a row of perfectly uniform caps. Los fucking Angeles, where even the thugs have a million-dollar smile.
“Shoulda sprung for botox,” I slurred.
His grin got wider. “Maybe someday I will. Got these in trade from a cosmetic dentist I did some work for.” He dropped my wallet. “Listen, Martin Hench, you stay the fuck away from Thames Estuary and Lawrence Coleman.”
“It’s Lionel Coleman,” I said.
“What the fuck ever,” he said. He labored to his feet. I stayed still. He looked at me from a great height, and I stared up his nostrils. Without warning, he kicked my ribs hard enough that I heard one of them crack.
“You’ve been told,” he said to my writhing body, and let himself out.
*
The storefront had an old break room with a first-aid kit, and a bathroom with a sink. I sponged myself clean in the mirror, ate two expired Aleves and three 200 mg expired Tylenols out of the kit. The ass was ripped most of the way out of my pants, so I moved my wallet to my front pocket, which my massage therapist had been nagging at me to do for years.
I opened the door more carefully this time and limped out into the parking lot. My rental—a little red Civic—was the only car left in the parking lot, except for a rusted junker with no tires that was the perennial sentry of its farthest corner.
I bipped the doors open with my fob, checked the back seat, then slid inside. I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror and winced, which pulled at my bruises and set blood oozing from my lip and cheekbone again, which made me wince harder. I was already halfway to Quasimodo and I tried to remember if there was a 7-Eleven on the route home where I could buy a couple of bags of frozen peas for the swelling.
I reset the mirror and backed out of my spot. The pain was increasing. They’d have Advil at the 7-Eleven, and I’d remembered where there was one on the way back to my Airbnb.
As I waited for a red light at Eagle Rock and Colorado Boulevard, I watched as a homeless man labored across the road with his shopping cart. I was still watching him when I realized the light had been green for some time and had just toggled yellow. I made the turn and headed up Colorado, but I was barely a hundred yards down the road when I heard a siren blat and saw the police lights. I checked my mirrors and saw the LASD cruiser directly behind me, racing right up to my bumper, slowing only at the very last moment. The cruiser’s high beams blinked insistently and the siren whooped.
I pulled over.
I waited while the officer slowly got out of his car and walked to my driver’s-side window. I kept my hands at ten and two. The officer tapped my window and made a roll-down motion, so I hit the button, moving slowly, putting my hand back.
I got a light in my face, squinting and thus reopening my cheekbone and lip.
“Everything all right, sir?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling the blood ooze down my chin. “I was beaten up,” I said, stating the obvious.
“That is unfortunate,” the officer said. “License and registration.”
I got my driver’s license out of my wallet and found the rental papers in the glove box and handed them over. He crunched back to his cruiser and I watched him in the side mirror. He’d left his cruiser’s headlights on and in the glare it was hard to tell, but it looked like there was another cop in the car whom he was conferring with. After a long delay, he came back.
“Step out of the car, please.”
I did. He turned me around and had me plant my hands on the hood, kicked my feet apart, and roughly frisked me, getting his hand inside the rent in the seat of my pants and patting my boxer shorts and giving my balls a hard squeeze.
“Sir, do you know why I stopped you?”
“I don’t,” I said.
“You proceeded unsafely through a traffic signal. Have you been drinking, sir?”
“I haven’t.”
“Have you consumed any cannabis or other drugs?”
“I haven’t.”
He turned me around and shone his light in my eyes. “If I search your car, am I gonna find any drugs?”
“No, sir.”
“Because I am gonna search that car and if I do find drugs and you’ve been lying to me, this is gonna be a lot worse than it needs to be.”
I didn’t dignify that with a response. My head hurt. My face hurt. My back hurt. This was a bullshit stop.
I expected the deputy’s partner to get out of the cruiser while my tormentor tossed the rental car, but he stayed put. I did, too. Obviously. I wasn’t going to take off on foot. I’m a forensic accountant, not a gang kid getting fifteen minutes of fame on Cops.
He spent long enough on the rental that I started to worry. Who knew what some previous driver might have shoved between the seats? But after pulling out the floor mats and tossing them onto the grassy verge beside the car, he finally stood up.
“All right, sir. I’m going to go and get a breathalyzer test. You can refuse it and I will then suspend your license for twenty-four hours. I will arrest you for a suspected DUI and bring you in for a blood test. If you fail that test, you will be subject to additional criminal penalties. Do you understand me?”
He had old coffee on his breath. My face hurt. “I’ll take a test.”
Back to the cruiser. It had been half an hour at least. Once the breathalyzer was done—fifteen minutes, if memory served—I could go to the 7-Eleven for painkillers and frozen peas. I decided I’d add a six-pack, I was so tired. My face hurt. I knew that mouthing off to this cop wouldn’t make things go faster, quite the opposite, but as he took his leisurely time coming back to me, I was hard-pressed not to.
I blew. “May I sit down?” I asked. “My face hurts.”
He didn’t bother to look up from his phone. “Stay where you are, sir.”
I stood. My face hurt. Time crawled. Finally, the breathalyzer beeped. He held it up and squinted at it, then used his phone to light up its face.
When he did, his sleeve rode up and revealed the “998” tattoo on his forearm.
Suddenly, I didn’t care so much about the pain in my face. The cop looked at me. He was an older guy, but quite a silver fox, in a Clooneyoid sort of way. Had the same smile lines at the corners of his lips and eyes. But on him, they looked mean. Dangerous. A man who would smile at you while he beat your face in.
“All right, sir,” he said. “I’m going to write you a citation for reckless driving and you will be free to go.” He smiled. “Thank you for your cooperation.” It sounded like “fuck you.”
Back to the cruiser again. When he was done writing, he switched off his headlights, and the bubble light inside the car lit up his partner. Heavyset. Smiling. Excellent teeth. He gave me the same look as he had just before kicking me in the ribs. I gasped involuntarily and my ribs burned. His smile got bigger.
The Clooneyoid deputy returned with my ticket. I looked at it and then I realized he’d said “reckless driving”—not “dangerous driving.” This was a summons, not a citation. For a misdemeanor. Two points off my license and I’d have to go to court. Depending on the judge, I could be in for fines or even a jail sentence.
Clooneyoid saw me figuring this out and he smiled, too. Everyone was having a great time tonight except for poor old Marty Hench.
“See you in court, sir,” he said.
I exercised extreme care on the drive to the 7-Eleven, even backing out of my parking spot and reparking so that I was perfectly centered between the white lines. The clerk didn’t bat an eye at my hamburger face. I gave myself five minutes to bury my bruises in the frozen peas before I backed out and drove the rest of the way to my Airbnb.
I drove five under the limit the whole way, and when I got out of my rental, I looked long and hard up and down the street for an LA Sheriff’s Department cruiser.
*
Benedetto was outraged by my face and swore he’d sue the Sheriff’s Department on my behalf. He got even angrier when I got stopped again, the following week, as I was leaving my concussion checkup at the Kaiser hospital on Sunset by a sheriff’s deputy who had me pull over in front of the big Scientology building.
This deputy was a little bantam rooster of a fellow, with a shiny bald head and mirror shades and no neck. He strutted up to my car, got me out of it, ran my ID, and frisked me.
“Do you know why I pulled you over, sir?” he said. He had that cop knack for making “sir” sound like “motherfucker.”
“No, sir,” I said, trying it out myself.
He didn’t like that and leaned in close enough for me to smell his aftershave and the scented sunscreen on his bare scalp.
“I stopped you, sir, because you were using your phone while driving.”
I must have looked surprised.
“I personally saw you tapping at your phone screen. That is a misdemeanor, sir. Reckless driving.”
He stopped as if waiting for me to respond. I made myself go mild. “Sir, I did not use my phone.”
He was waiting for that. He narrowed his eyes and leaned in closer. “Are you telling me I didn’t see what I saw?”
Mild, Marty, mild. “I don’t know what you saw, sir, but I didn’t use my phone.”
He rocked back and tilted his head. Patients went by with crutches and walkers. Nurses and doctors passed in scrubs. Scientologists scurried in and out of their gigantic temple. A fruit cart man labored past us.
“Well, sir, this should be simple enough to resolve.” He reached for his belt and pulled out a generic ruggedized cop-rectangle of gear, and unspooled a multiheaded cable from its side. He leaned into the rental and retrieved my phone, and squinted at its I/O port, then attached the cable to my phone. The rugged rectangle beeped. “I’m gathering forensics on your mobile device, sir,” he said.
I’d figured that out already. My phone—like yours and everyone else’s—was a trove of my most intimate information, a record of all the places I’d been and people I’d spoken to and all the things I’d said to them. It was full of photos and passwords and client files and voice memos. It was more information than any judge would have granted a warrant for on a reckless-driving rap.
The little man smirked as he held my phone and his gadget. I stayed mild as milk. I was running full-device encryption. I’m no computer security expert, but I spend a lot of time around them, and they’d been insistent on this point, and had made reference to this very scenario in describing why I would bother to dig around my phone’s settings to turn this on.
God, my face hurt. I didn’t know how long the gadget was supposed to take, but from the cop’s increasing impatience, I could tell it was going long.
Beep. The cop shaded the gadget’s little screen from the punishing LA sun with one hand and peered at it.
“Sir, I need you to unlock this device, please.”
My face hurt. Be mild, Marty. “I invoke my right to counsel,” I said.
He pursed his lips. “Sir, if you would please enter your unlock code, we can verify whether your device is in use and we can both be on our way.”
“I invoke my right to remain silent.” I said it straight into his bodycam.
He sighed and looked irritated. I had known Benedetto for so long that I had once had to dial his number from a landline. I’d long ago memorized his office’s number, 1–800-LAWER4U. He’d bought it early, back before 800 numbers got expensive, and he’d had plenty of offers for it. He’d kept it.