The Front of the Freeway (8 page)

“‘You’re right where you belong,’” he spits from behind his long, trembling fingers, still shaking with frustration. “That’s what they told me, Julian. The Lieutenant finally retired, and when I told them I deserved the job, that’s what they told me. ‘You’re right where you belong.’” I can smell the whiskey stinking from his skin, choking my nostrils and biting at my eyes. He drops his hands to his lap, tensely slapping one curled fist against the other hand, his glossy, bloodshot eyes fixed on the floor. “I followed every order, every procedure. I did everything by the book, and now they’re going to leave me behind like the fucking trash, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.” I want to tell him it’s just a job, but I know that’s a lie. It’s the foundation he built his whole miserable, orderly life on, and he’s starting to feel the cracks beneath him pinching at his feet. I roll to a seat on the floor next to him, wrapping my arms around my knees, staring into the pulsing square light blazing on the far side of the room.

“I quit my job,” I start, reaching for some common ground. Maybe he wants to see some order in my life, but right now I think we’re both pretty fed up with the career ladder, and I can see him at the bottom of it, staring up at the endless rungs, wondering if he ever should have grabbed one in the first place. He twists his heavy, greyed head enough to stare at my shoes and slowly sighs.

“Well, if you hate it, Julian, maybe it’s for the best.”

“I kind of got something else lined up, anyway. I think I’m going to end up happier.” I think. I still have to close this deal with Cesar, and I’m never sure what little insanity Tony’s going to pull me into next, but there’s something to be said about the uncertainty of it all, and the comfort of knowing I won’t find myself throwing empty bottles around my house over office politics. It’s like climbing out of a vice, pulling the locked metal teeth off of my ribs and breathing in for the first time. But my father’s caught too deep in the bear trap. There’s no climbing out for him, not right now. Nauseous from the flickering mechanical light, I push myself up and move to hit the light switch by the door.

“They killed one of us yesterday.” The blood’s back in my father’s voice, but not the same color as before. My foot freezes on the linoleum and a cold chill runs down my neck, gripping my lungs, freezing my blood. “Eddy…you remember, soon-to-be Sergeant Eddy? They sent him after some kids coming out of a toy store or something, thought it would help give the promotion some credibility. They killed him, Julian. This fucked up, bureaucratic machine, it’s killing me, one day at a time, and now it killed him, too.” Eddy Miller. He had a name. He must have had a family and a father and a life, too. Murderer, killer, accomplice—some excruciating voice screams from the back of my conscious, clawing through every thought and feeling that threatens to forget. That machine didn’t kill him; Tony did, with a .38 caliber Glock in the front of an Oldsmobile they’re never going to find.

“Who the fuck robs a baby store anyway?”

“Someone really desperate, I guess.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He wipes his nose and pushes himself to his feet, stumbling across a glass minefield of pointed shards towards his bedroom door. He used to walk on his toes, teaming with some hidden energy. Now the whiskey drags him around like a wet mop. He stops in the hallway and turns halfway to me, a somber, weathered face flickering in the dim light. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this, Son. I just need a win, you know?” Yeah, I know. And I want to scream, I think there’s a way out, Dad, and you can climb out from under all of this. But I can’t tell him all that, not yet. I need to my find my own way out first, and Cesar’s is the only name on my mind.

“This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.”

—Al Capone

Tony gave me the keys to the Mercedes, which would have been a nice gesture if he hadn’t stolen the thing a week earlier. He swapped the SUV’s license plate with a Mercedes of Crenshaw plaque from the dealership and told me not to worry about it, but I’m still trying not to break my neck from checking over my shoulder for cops. But the beach is a long walk from downtown, and the buses don’t go to Malibu, not where I’m going. Besides, except for a few stray cars spotted along the beach highway, the traffic’s mostly clear, and there’s nothing more beautiful or rare in L.A. than an open road, so for now I take a deep breath of salted ocean air and lean on the gas.

I can’t shake the feeling that I’m sitting in a rich man’s wallet, smooth black leather wrapped around everything, and a lot of backlit buttons on the glossy oak dashboard that just look like money. A woman coos at me in French over the intercom. Tony said he doesn’t understand a word, but he thinks her voice is sexy, so I’m stuck with her for the ride. I don’t know what she’s saying either, but I’m pretty sure she likes me.

“Il fait quatre-vingts degrés.”

Count Tony usually doesn’t operate in daylight, but I guess this is my thing, and driving down PCH on a sunny afternoon is like driving through a van Gogh. The Pacific is a sea of gems stretching out from the long bending ocean highway, a deep blue expanse strewn with a thousand diamonds dancing and flashing under a low hanging California sun. On the other side, sprawling green hills ripple out across the countryside, peppered every few minutes by towering white castles, Home & Gardens mansions peering out from miniature, tamed forests or pointed metal gates. An electric chime hiccups inside the car again, breaking the spell; I know I should wear my seatbelt, but I never could stand the feeling of being tied down to something.

Cesar’s is one of these glass cathedrals, three reflective, jagged stories stacked on a creamy white foundation, but his isn’t perched high in the Malibu Hills like the others. Cesar’s sinks some three hundred feet down into rolling hillside, a thin ribbon of road climbing out from the translucent palace hidden like a glacier in the dry valley. I take a sharp right onto a long gravel track winding down through the sand and brush as a heavy metal briefcase slams against the wall of the trunk with a dull thud. $75,000 in hundreds straight from the Bank of Tony, to be returned with interest, of course, locked and bolted in an aluminum box, just in case I need to close today.

“Don’t let him bully you.” That’s the last thing Tony told me before I left. “If he’s going to work with you, he has to trust you, and if he’s going to trust you, he has to respect you. And if you lay down like a bitch, none of those things are going to happen.” Fine. I’ve never been much of a pushover, and I’ve been watching Tony close enough to play businessman myself. But it’s not Tony’s voice coming out of my mouth anymore. The strings are off my back. There’s a voice box a few feet in front of the automatic steel gate—here’s my chance.

“Hello?”

The gate’s about 12 feet high, a flowery pattern of twisted metal rolling into a single arch across the paved road, a mile-long spear-tipped fence jutting out from either side. Ten feet in front is a little black electronic box on a thick white stand, and I’m next to it, yelling at nobody.

“Hello?”

The box crackles with static and a muffled voice mumbles from the back of it.

“Name?”

I twist my mouth to a J and almost fumble out the name Julian, but I catch it and instead cough out, “It’s Tony.” The static snaps to silence, and for a second I’m frozen halfway out the window. Then, a harsh brass buzz, and the gate swings slowly open, an iron jaw unclenching, inviting me in. I roll forward cautiously, kicking up a spurt of loose gravel behind me, and edge down the mile-long paved tongue.

Cesar lives in the serrated shell of a broken ice sculpture, a lot of sharp glass angles jutting out like translucent knives from smooth white pillars and overhangs. Two long, crystal wings face the ocean, a reflective pair of arms hugging a wide, ivory patio with a squat, circular fountain in the middle of it all, bubbling with the mansion’s steady heartbeat. I pull up next to the concrete spring and kill the engine. Keeping my eyes on the massive glass entrance, I lean over to pop open the glove box and pull out Tony’s heavy black pistol. That’s the other thing he told me. Take this. And I did, I tucked it in the back of my pants under my belt without saying a word, but the weight of it pressed against my spine is more of a bad memory than anything. Keeping the barrel on the steering wheel, I press the small black release and the weight of a full magazine falls into my lap. One by one, I push the thick gold bullets out onto the passenger’s seat, chafing my thumb on their dense metal backs.

No more bodies.

I kick open the door and jam the pistol into the back of my pants again, fidgeting with my t-shirt to hide the little jagged bulge as I walk to the front door. The entrance is a house of mirrors, a hundred thousand reflections doused in sunlight, but someone has to be behind them looking out at me. I skip up three rounded white steps to a tall glass frame and almost reach for the handle, but after a second the door clicks, and I nudge it open. The entrance is a Greek temple coated in a melted checkers board, black-and-white marble patterns dripping down the walls and across the floor, twisting up again into a massive, spiraling staircase wrapped around the room. Every glossy, ivory tile is trimmed with a sharp, black ink stroke, all framing a giant black marble Icarus in the center of the floor, his deceptively feathery wings spread at least ten feet from the ground, his outstretched arm straining to reach a pointed crystal chandelier trickling from the ceiling. So this is what real money looks like. Before I can wonder where to go next, a pair of footsteps echoes from the far side of the room, and Cesar steps out from behind the massive black-and-white staircase.

“Tony, my friend! Welcome!”

Icarus might be the biggest man in the room, but only barely. The room thunders with Cesar’s footsteps as he crosses the floor, his towering, muscular form gliding across the tile in long, smooth strides. A pair of cannonballs at his shoulders meet in a thick, trunk of a neck, supporting a squared Aztec jaw smiling politely at me from across the room. After a few quick steps the smile is in front of me, smirking above an outstretched hand. “It’s a pleasure, Tony.”

So this is what real money looks like.

As we shake hands, the diamonds in Cesar’s watch dance, flickering pink and green and blue and gold in a neat circle around his wrist. Bulging, tattooed veins slither up his arms, winding across his smooth, tanned skin before diving beneath the folded cuffs of a pressed, purple shirt.

“It’s good to talk in person,” I answer. From across the room, I couldn’t see the two black, scripted Vs tattooed above each ear on his massive, shaven skull, but next to me they squirm and quiver with every word from his mouth.

“Yes, it is. I’ve heard a lot about you, Tony. From Jasper, from Christian—and Martín never shuts up.” Jasper and Christian? Martín speaks? I guess I should have expected this, Tony never tells me much more than
he
needs me to know, which is rarely half what I need to know.

“Well, I wouldn’t listen to Martín too much. He might have smoked most of his sense away by now.”

“You’re probably right. That happens too much in this business, sometimes. But then again, sometimes not enough. We have to keep busy, no?” Cesar wraps one calloused, bronze hand around my shoulder, leading me to a long hallway hidden behind the staircase. On one side, a transparent glass wall frames a flat mirror of water outside, a rectangular pool as angled and reflective as the pointed house, flooding the hall with a brilliant, white light. On the other, a squat, oak door breaks a perfectly seamless white wall, guarded by another well-dressed Latino giant almost as big as Cesar, who doesn’t nod as we walk by. Cesar stops at the door and squeezes the handle, dismissing his guard with a curt Spanish whistle. “Oye, vete Omar, we got this.” Omar looks skeptically down his oversized, flattened nose at me but backs away, reluctantly lumbering to the end of the hall to resume his sentry, both eyes fixed to my back, overtly suspicious and immensely unimpressed.

With a sharp jerk Cesar rips the wooden frame open and steps down into the basement, a narrow row of concrete steps falling through the dim light to a decaying cement floor. As luxurious and immense is the house, the basement is conversely decrepit and claustrophobic, the rotting, stone heart of Cesar’s pristine glass kingdom. And covering every surface—every wall, every shelf, and in a dozen cardboard boxes sagging in the shadows—is a thick coat of perfectly white snow. Bag after bag of soft, chalky, white snow. A lot of it.

Plastic-wrapped powder bricks line the walls and cover the floor, a hundred short, boxy snowmen crowded in crates and boxes. Cesar steps down into the igloo, his shoe leaving a faint print in the dusty, grey floor, and hops on to a closed wooden box, inviting me to the one beside him. “Please, sit down. Welcome to my office.”

His office? In a Malibu mansion bound in marble, Cesar chooses to work in a dark concrete shoe box covered in ash. Maybe he’s just flexing, kicking his feet up on a few million dollars like a beanbag, or maybe he just wants me to know that I’m in his world now. But either way, he wants me down here for a reason.

“Still unpacking?”

“What, this? No, this is nothing, this is something for a friend in the Valley. Two million. Nothing. I blow my nose with two million.” A beach house in Malibu, a yacht in Newport; a Kleenex for Cesar. I was right, he’s flaunting his mailroom, but it’s not just for show. He’s trying impress me, and it’s working. “You know, I started like you, Tony. I had to work my way up in my city…climb out of my city. Make a name for myself, you know?”

“Write your own rules.”

“Exactly, my friend. Write my own rules. Make my own law. There’s no other way.” This is all too familiar. The frosted walls, the anarchistic blather. I’m back in the walk-in freezer with Tony, but at least I’ve heard this monologue before. “You and me, Tony, we’re the same.”

“Not exactly the same. I’m not wiping my nose with two million.”