The Silent Second Read online

  I called up the real estate agent my wife and I used on our two previous homes. I wanted to learn more about these properties that Ed owned, particularly the financial situation with them.

  “Are you by chance looking to buy?” she asked in a playful way that failed to mask the desperation in her voice. I thought I heard her lick her lips.

  “Just looking for some information on a couple of properties,” I answered without answering her question. “I believe they are all owned by the same individual.”

  “Look at you,” she laughed, “swooping in on some distressed opportunities, are you?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Cash is king, you know.”

  “Cash is king,” I replied.

  “You’re smart to buy and not rent,” she said. “Did you know the median mortgage payment just fell below the average rent on a comparable home?”

  It was an innocuous enough comment but in it was a troubling development. She assumed I was looking for a place to occupy as opposed to a place to generate income. Why would she assume that a person who, as far as she knew, lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills with his wife be looking for a new place to live unless someone had told her that Claire and I had separated? So Claire was openly talking about our separation with others.

  “Do you have a pen?” I snapped. I gave her the addresses of the properties Ed owned.

  “Hmm,” she said, “I’m not too familiar with those streets.” That wasn’t much of a surprise as she specialized in homes with private gates, not grates on the windows. Glassell Park was a run-down area tucked under Glendale and known widely for its gang violence. Los Angeles police had taken a containment policy on the neighborhood. They tacitly allowed the criminal activity to work itself out as long as it didn’t migrate up the hill to Mount Washington and its city-view homes.

  “They’re in some up-and-coming areas,” I said.

  “You know, since you mentioned it, I have an open house tomorrow for this great house near Hillhurst, south of Sunset. I think it’s perfect for you.”

  “South of Sunset, huh?” I repeated only because I knew it would annoy her. In her heyday she would never have worked that far down the hill on the crappier end of Koreatown. The financial crash and halting recovery winnowed out the winners and losers in the real estate world. It sounded like she was a member of the latter.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she told me. “It’s still a good ways from Kimchi-Land. Come by tomorrow!”

  “Red Zone!” I shouted, but she hung up too quickly.

  I laughed at how naturally that phrase slipped from my mouth. “Red Zone” was the high-water mark of a career I didn’t so much choose as rise up with, like a skiff in the tide. When I joined the firm I was just a kid out of college looking for a paycheck. They started me doing administrative work in the personnel division. Only later would it be renamed “Human Resources.” My first job was to collect and destroy all the ashtrays in the office. The state of California had recently banned smoking in the workplace, and being the new guy, I was chosen to be the messenger bearing bad news. Leatherfaced administrative assistants glared at me as I wheeled my cart through the office. We established a smoking room on one of the floors but even that was eventually closed after a series of secondhand smoke lawsuits. Eventually everyone had to go outside and huddle in a roped-off area far from the building’s entrance.

  As corporate litigations rose, along with the sizeable compensation that juries were awarding, companies across the country scrambled for ways to mitigate the risk of being sued. I found a niche where one didn’t exist before—liability eradication. My big breakthrough came in 1993.

  The hot issue of the day was sexual harassment, following the Navy Tailhook scandal. A pat on the ass, a couple “sweet cheeks” comments, and a promotion awarded to a male colleague could turn into a slamdunk case. We quickly realized that changing associate behavior would take time, especially among the older set of associates who still expected their “secretaries” to buy gifts for their wives and their girlfriends. We were ripe for lawsuits.

  Like many discoveries in Los Angeles, my aha moment came while sitting in traffic. That’s where I devised the “Stoplight System.” It was a way for associates to warn each other that their words or actions were inappropriate. It worked like this.

  There were three zones: Red, Yellow, and Green. Green was logically the safest zone; yellow meant you were approaching a dangerous area; and red was purely unacceptable behavior. So say someone was to ask an African American associate about his plans for the holidays.

  “What are you doing for Christmas, Gary?”

  This could be countered with a warning that the seemingly innocuous question wasn’t entirely appropriate.

  “Yellow Zone, Jerry,” he would say. “My family chooses to celebrate Kwanzaa at this time of year.”

  If the dialogue were to escalate—“You know that’s a made-up holiday, right?”—all the offended party had to say were two words—“Red Zone”—to alert everyone of the seriousness of the offense. The issue would then immediately be reported to Human Resources.

  The beauty of the Stoplight System was that it put the onus of educating the workforce on the offended party. It also hedged against claims that the company willingly ignored signs of discrimination. After all, it was on the complainant to notify in the moment if there was an issue and then file it with the appropriate department. A person could not later claim habitual abuse if he or she failed to follow the policies set by the system.

  The program was a huge success. We never had to pay out an unsafe workplace claim. It also launched me into management. I never quite replicated the success of the Stoplight System, but that didn’t matter. Reputations are built on first impressions and they last for many years. I parlayed my reputation into numerous promotions and an outer office on the north side of the building. I achieved a level of success at which I could soon throttle back on my career journey and begin the long, slow descent into early retirement. That is, of course, unless I ruined it by foolish actions like snooping through personnel files after everyone had gone home for the weekend.

  Although the family had asked me for help, sifting through someone’s personnel file was in direct violation of our ethics policy. It was another poor decision I made, one that no more than a year ago would have been unthinkable.

  I didn’t want to admit it, but I had changed since my separation. The enthusiastic dedication of a mid-level corporate cog was eroding to a point where I was putting my long-term future with the company in jeopardy. All those creeping doubts about the value of a career in liability management surfaced in my comments in meetings. They were caustic, not yet poisonous, but the shift was palpable. I needed to be more careful. Even the hatchet man has a hatchet with his name on it waiting to fall.

  As I reflected on my mistakes, I noticed something at the top of Ed’s file that made my heart skip. There was a small call-out box that listed all the people who had viewed the file. There was my name alongside today’s date stamp. This tool was put in place to monitor ethics violations like the one I was committing. If anyone were to look through this file they would see I had been snooping. That was a very unlikely scenario and one I could easily talk my way out of but the threat was there.

  Then I noticed something else—I wasn’t the only one nosing around Ed’s file. Right above my name was that of my co-manager, Paul Darbin. I pondered this discovery for a moment. Ed wasn’t in Paul’s coverage group so he had no work-related reason to look at his file. Also, by his comment earlier in the day by the elevators, it seemed he didn’t even know who Ed was. It was odd that he would say that when he had viewed the man’s profile just two days earlier.

  ARMENIAN POWER

  As financial pundits desperately searched for signs of a recovery from the 2007 crash, the catchphrase “green shoots” seeped into their daily lexicon. They pointed to any economic report that was even remotely positive as an indication of good t
idings ahead. These wonderfully delicate seedlings were emerging from the rubble, signifying rejuvenation and future prosperity. Humans can be relentlessly optimistic when they need to be. One area that didn’t need to believe in green shoots was Hancock Park.

  I drove through the tiny streets with their Colonial Revivals and sprawling lawns on my way to meet the broker who had worked with Ed on a recent deal. Business really was soft with my old real estate agent because she got back to me with this information within the hour. Ed was underwater on the two apartment complexes in Glassell Park. The situation on the Lincoln Heights property was bleaker as he hadn’t made a payment in over a year. He had tried to sell the property weeks before he disappeared but for some reason it had fallen out of escrow.

  The broker’s office was in Larchmont Village, a oneblock area serving as the mini-downtown for Hancock Park. It specialized in brunch and Pilates. Saturday afternoon was its high season so I was forced to park at one of the meters on a side street.

  Emerald Properties occupied the space over a fine wine and cheese shop. The company was allowed one of the ground-floor bays to advertise its services, but the actual office was up a creaky flight of stairs. Like cars, you couldn’t use addresses to surmise one’s financial status. Behind many a BMW there’s a lease agreement the driver can’t afford, and behind every address on a well-heeled street was a back office at half the rent.

  Bill Langford was a lithe, well-groomed man in his forties. He sported aggressive eyewear, a big-faced watch that looked expensive, and a striped shirt with monogrammed cuffs. He buzzed around the office with a nervous energy and took two telephone calls before turning his attention back to me.

  “Sorry about that. Saturday’s my busy day,” he told me, but he didn’t sound at all remorseful.

  “It’s amazing how we find a way to get it all done,” I commiserated. I had learned in an offsite training program that establishing a hierarchy, or eliminating one, was critical in all personal interactions. By using the pronoun “we” I was putting us on equal ground. And to prove that my time was just as important as his, I added, “I have to run to an appointment across town so this should be quick.”

  Now that the values of each of our respective times were equal, he stopped fussing with his papers and phone calls and gave me his undivided attention.

  “So you wanted to talk about the Deakins Building? There’s not much I can tell you. I don’t represent the owner on that property.”

  “You made an offer to purchase it.”

  “Incorrect,” he snapped like a middle-school English teacher. “I represented a buyer who made an offer to purchase it.”

  “Do you do a lot of deals in that area?”

  I seemed to have nicked his pride. “I do all types of deals, in all neighborhoods, at all levels,” he answered tersely.

  “So what happened to this deal?”

  “Nothing happened. It fell through.”

  “Any reason?”

  “The seller backed out.”

  “Did he give a reason why?”

  Langford started to answer but then thought better of it. “Who are you?” he asked. I told him my name. “No, who are you? An agent?”

  I shook my head.

  “A broker?”

  “No.”

  “A lawyer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then why are you wasting my time asking me all of these questions?”

  “Ed Vadaresian, the owner of the building you tried to purchase, went missing six months ago and hasn’t been heard from since.”

  I was purposely blunt to match the tone he was using on me but I didn’t expect the kind of reaction I got. Langford sat up in his chair, coiled like he was ready to bolt for the door. His movement was slight but very noticeable. Years of grilling associates taught me to pick up on a few things. I also knew the next thing he said would tell me a lot.

  “Okay. But what does that have to do with me?” he asked and I knew he was trying to hide something. It was a common deflection technique the guilty use when pressed.

  “Nothing, as far as I can tell. I am working with the family to find out some answers.”

  “What are you, a detective?”

  All these careers he accused me of having sounded better than the one I had. I half-wanted to tell him I was a detective. I had this image of some shadowy, marginal figure helping out those in need, someone who settled things with his fists in a time when that only got you sued. “I’m just a friend helping out the family,” I told him instead.

  “Oh. Why didn’t you say so?” he said and returned to his original posture. He leaned back in his chair and his tone changed. He rattled off all he knew like we were two chums catching up on old times.

  Langford brokered the deal for the Deakins sale. It was a strange deal from the start. First, Ed represented himself during the sale but had a limited grasp of even basic commercial real estate contracts.

  “I was doing more teaching than negotiating!” he said, laughing. Langford admitted that he was tempted to take advantage of Ed, but the deal they were making was good enough as it was. His buyer made a very strong, very competitive, all-cash offer. “Cash is king right now,” he added.

  “Yeah, I heard that already. Did Ed say why he backed out?”

  “He did not,” Langford replied. “Can’t say it made a lot of sense. Sure, deals fall through all the time. It’s part of the business. But this guy Ed was very motivated. There was no activity on his building and we came in with a good offer.”

  “Any chance he might have gotten a better offer?”

  “Have you seen the building?” I told him I hadn’t. “No one wants anything to do with that area.”

  “But you had someone who was interested,” I reminded him.

  “Special circumstances.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I shouldn’t discuss the details with you,” but he continued to anyway. “An investor. I can’t give out their name.”

  “Privacy concerns,” I finished for him.

  “That’s right.”

  “So no guesses on why Ed would have backed out of the deal?” I pressed.

  “Maybe he just ran out of time,” he answered.

  I pondered that last comment. All morning I lurched toward the conclusion that Ed, under the great financial burden of underwater properties and foreclosure notices, realized that he had no satisfactory exit and decided to make his own by taking his life. But why would he pull out of a deal that would have given him some respite from his money issues? That part made no sense. Also, Ed didn’t fit the type, if there was one, who would turn to suicide as an answer.

  “What do you mean by ‘ran out of time’?”

  Langford stared at me with a coy smile. “How much digging have you done?” he asked in a whisper.

  “I just started. And why are we whispering?”

  “Think of it this way. What’s this guy doing with that kind of building way over there?”

  I followed his finger as he pointed at a spot on the desk that I imagine represented Ed, then moved to another spot that was the Deakins Building, then a sweeping gesture that could only be referring to Lincoln Heights.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told him.

  “He wasn’t in on this by himself,” he lectured. “Everyone has a business partner.”

  “Okay…”

  “He’s Armenian…” he said again like that teacher, this time trying to lead the student to the answer. This student was clueless.

  “Spell it out for me, please, Mr. Langford.”

  “Outsiders don’t do a lot of real estate deals with Armenians. They are notoriously hard to work with and the ownership structure is always way too murky. Nothing ever has a clear title. And you never know where the money is coming from. One day you’re talking to a sweet man like Mr. Vadaresian and the next minute two bruisers in leather jackets and shaved heads are pounding on your door.”

  “Arme
nian Power?” I laughed. “Isn’t that the name of Glendale’s utility company?”

  Easy Mike didn’t laugh at my joke, but I could tell he appreciated it. We stood in line at a small taco stand on the seedier, east end of Melrose Avenue. The al pastor was good here, as evidenced by the dozen or so people milling about. A short vaquero with a pot belly and a straw hat stood just off Mike’s shoulder like he was ready to dart forward and cut in front of him. It clearly irritated Mike.

  “AP is an Armenian organized crime outfit,” he explained, then glanced in the potential line-cutter’s direction. “They’re big in East Hollywood and Glendale and starting to spread out into the Valley. So go the Armenians, so follows the AP.”

  “The Armenians have a mob?”

  “It’s no joke,” he said. “These guys are legit. The big shots—they call them ‘Vors’—are all back in Russia. They run the operation out of there.”

  We shuffled forward to the order window, and the vaquero moved in step with us, maybe even a tad closer.

  “Can you believe this guy?” Easy Mike said to me. “I can feel his breath on my shoulder.”

  “So what do you make of this story?”

  “That broker may not be too off. We ran a story on Armenian Power a few years back after the FBI broke up an identity theft ring. They’re a pretty nasty group,” he said, moving forward in line and in tandem with his new friend. “We tried to make a link between them and Councilman Abramian. He didn’t take it too well. AP has their hands in a lot of pots. Credit card fraud, Medicaid fraud, mortgage—”

  Easy Mike stopped mid-sentence, whirled around to face the vaquero, and started unbuttoning his pants.

  “Jump on in,” he shouted and dropped his pants to his ankles. “You’re standing close enough we might as well be sharing the same pair of pantalones!”

  For what seemed like the thousandth time since I had known him, I found myself muttering the phrase that eventually would be shortened into a nickname. “Take it easy, Mike.”