Down Solo (3 page)

I tell her about meeting Ratboy, showing him the documents, and Bobby helping me get out of the restaurant. I don’t mention the copies. She says, “All right, I know all that. What happened next?”

I shake my head and say, “Nope, your turn.”

She says, “At least tell me where the case is.” I tell her I don’t know. She gets up to leave and says, “Well, then our work together is done, isn’t it?”

I’m tempted to let her leave. She’s hot, but she’s trouble and I should have sensed it from the moment she came through my door. There’s a bullet in my head and I don’t have a dime to show for it and I’m pissed and not about to let it all go, so I say, “What if I could help you get it back?”

She looks down at me like I just told her I could fly, then shakes her head and sits down again, this time next to me on the loveseat. The cat’s gone. She puts her hand on my knee and says, “Charlie, I’m sorry. I know I’ve been an absolute bitch, and you don’t deserve it. I’m just under huge pressure and now this whole thing is getting away from me.” A tear comes to her eye; she blinks and it runs down her cheek. Amazing.

I put my hand on hers and give it a little squeeze. Two can play this game, or any game for that matter. What I need is the story. I reach out and wipe the tear from her cheek and say, “Okay, geologist’s report, from the top.”

Her eyes widen. “You looked?”

“I got a glimpse when I showed Ratboy.”

“Who?”

“The kid at the restaurant. Looks like Ratboy, from the movie. C’mon, the story.”

She withdraws her hand. “I don’t see how it will help. What do you want to know for?”

I tell her, “Hey, I’m just a snoop.” I’ve always loved that line.

“Okay, whatever.” She pauses, then seems to come to a decision and says, “My husband put his last eight mil into a bogus gold mine.” She drains her latte and continues. “He was fully invested in a luxury shopping center in the Valley and the project got upside down after the economy tanked. He had the eight million in cash—it was off the books and didn’t show up in the bankruptcy proceedings. Do you know anything about the world of precious metals investments?”

“You mean where telemarketers rip off old people with overpriced coin scams?”

“No, but close. The price of gold has more than tripled in the last ten years. It corrected some but is still strong. There’s a bunch of mines, all over the world, that closed down when the price of bullion was too low to support the cost of getting the gold out of the ground. Now that the price is back up, people are taking another look at these properties. Plus, the technology has gotten better for extracting the gold. So, one consequence is that hundreds of fly-by-night companies are buying up drilling rights and then luring investors with promises of the next giant discovery. The pitch is that there’s proven gold there that can guarantee at least a double on the investment, but a high probability of finding bigger deposits if they drill deeper.” I’m looking out at the window and out of the corner of my eye I see her pluck another lash. I turn back to her and her hand flicks the lash away.

“And people are buying into this?” Here’s a scam I haven’t come across yet.

“Like crazy. The companies are set up on the Vancouver Exchange. People don’t trust stocks any more, and the gold bugs are screaming about the demise of the dollar: that the government is deliberately inflating it in order to pay back China with cheaper money, but that the end result will be a currency with no value and gold at twenty-five hundred an ounce and more.”

“Okay, so your husband bought into the story.” The cat jumps up on my lap and stands up with his paws on my shoulder. He’s sniffing my baseball cap on the bullet-hole side, trying to push his nose under the visor. I push him away but he jumps back up and tries again.

“Cat likes your hat.” She seems amused. I’m not. I grab the cat by the nape of his neck and toss him on the floor.

“Yeah, he bought into the story, but it wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. Have you ever heard of a guy named Jason Hamel?”

“No, who’s that?”

“An interesting character. He has a newsletter that follows gold and silver in general plus a handful of these Vancouver penny stocks. The stuff he’s recommended has actually made money, and he has a reputation for being on the ball. Knows his geology, the investment world, and has a good grip on the international scene, the big picture and what it’s going to do to the dollar.” This chick is way smarter than I thought, but where she’s going with this is still a mystery to me.

“So?”

“So he’s the guy with the con. He used his own money to buy a property in Mexico, then altered the original geologist’s report to make it look like there’s enough historic gold—what the previous drill results showed—to make the investment safe, and what they call inferred gold and potential deep tonnage that could make the investment a ten-bagger.”

“A ten-bagger?”

“A speculator’s home run. Ten bucks for every buck invested. Eight million becomes eighty million. My husband bought it hook, line, and sinker. With him as an investor, Hamel is trying to raise another twelve million. He says twenty is the target for the drill projects and further land acquisition.”

“All this on a bogus geologist’s report. Aren’t there other copies sitting around?” It seems too dumb and simple to me.

“Nope. The previous owners were a private partnership. They had the one report and folded the operation.”

“So where are they now?”

“Well, that’s the weird thing. They’re dead, and one of them was the geologist who drew up the report.”

“And you’re trying to get your husband’s money back.” The picture is starting to make sense. I was the delivery boy in a blackmail scheme gone bad.

“He can’t do it legally because it’s unreported income. Once the investment paid out, he was going to pay the taxes and penalties on the original money, but he can’t do that now. And if I expose the scam, Jason can’t get the other investors on board.”

“So what happened at your end last night?”

“I met Jason at a restaurant in Brentwood. He was supposed to have the money in his car, but then he came up with some bullshit story about needing an extra day to get the money out of some reserve account or something.” She looks at me and spreads her hands as if to say, “So there you have it,” but I’m confident there are major parts missing.

“So how did you find the original report?”

She smiles and shakes her head and says, “Charlie, you’ve got the basic story. The details don’t matter and I need to hear what happened last night.”

At the table next to us, a tall skinny kid dressed in black is moving his head to music only he can hear, drumming the tabletop with his fingers. His head is shaved, except for a thatch of green hair spiking out from the top, and he has a huge beak for a nose. He looks at me and sneers, “What’s your fucking problem, dude?”

I tell him, “No problem. About twenty years ago I got drunk and had sex with a parrot. I thought maybe you were my son.”

Like Tanya says, there’s the basic story, and the details shouldn’t matter.

¤ ¤ ¤

The Cheesecake Factory’s office door let out into the parking lot right where it butts up to the docks. I took the wooden walkway up about a hundred yards, then crossed the street and doubled back to Jimmy’s building. Jimmy buzzed me in and I took the elevator, grateful to have dodged Ratboy and any goons he might have had waiting outside. I figured there had to be backup or Tanya would have just told me to leave.

Jimmy had company. His date was a body builder with breasts that looked like twin howitzer shells. Must have been the Irish in her. He asked her to fix us some drinks and then told me the goods were in the front bathroom. His table was cleared of all drug-related implements and had a vase full of irises instead. The deal when Jimmy has straight company is to act normal, have a drink, visit for a few minutes, use the bathroom on the way out, and go.

“Nice Halliburton.” Jimmy likes expensive things. I told him, “Yeah, top secret documents. Secret agents are after me.” I was kidding, to cover that I wasn’t kidding. It was nice out, so he led us to the balcony and we sat there looking out toward the ocean. We chitchatted for a while. Tanya called and I told her I would call back in a few minutes. I put the phone on the table next to my drink. Jimmy kept looking down at the ground where the parking lot elevator lets out and finally nodded toward a palm at the corner of the parking structure. I looked down and saw Ratboy check his watch and start to move away.

“I hope that’s not one of your secret agents.” Jimmy thinks the world is full of them. Heroin is probably good medicine for his natural paranoia. I told him I had a bit of a situation and should probably leave.

There was a bindle in the top left drawer in the bathroom. I had just had four drinks and my back was feeling pretty good, so I snorted a third of the powder and folded the rest up for when I got home. On a whim, I took out the geologist reports and put them in a cupboard under the sink, folded into a plush green towel. I left the photocopies in the Halliburton.

This time I headed the opposite direction, north toward Washington Boulevard, and then doubled back to get my bike. I was pretty high when I got to it. The ride home was mostly a dream until I got to my street. It got darker when I turned off Venice Boulevard, and I noticed a silver Mustang, shiny and new, turn just behind me. It caught up and paced me for the length of a few houses and . . .

And that’s all I remember.

¤ ¤ ¤

“What do you mean, that’s all you remember? You left the Cheesecake, you went across the street to your friend’s and had a drink, you rode your goddamn bike home, and that’s all you remember? That’s your whole fucking story?” She’s just about shouting.

The kid next to us stops his drumming and looks at her and says, “It’s as good as your lame story,” and then closes his eyes and starts conducting his inner symphony.

I tell her that’s when they must have jumped me, whacked me in the head with a bat, and taken the attaché case. That I have strange mental blank spots about the next twenty-four hours. I look at her and spread my hands as if to say, “So there you have it.”

She twists the top button of her blouse. I’d like to twist it off, along with the rest of them, but then what could I do? I honestly don’t know. She says, “So what do you mean, maybe you can help me get it back?”

I tell her that I switched out the reports and that all the goons got were copies. Her hand flies back to my knee and she says, “You’ve still got it? Are you kidding me? Let’s go get it.”

It seems dumb—I was just at Jimmy’s—but hey, who knew? What I do know is that nobody wakes Jimmy before two in the afternoon. I tell her it’s not that easy and I’ll phone her in a few hours, then I get up to leave.

She stands up, hugs me, and says, “I’m sorry I got you into this. And about what I said earlier.”

I tell her “No problem,” but what I really want now is to get out of here and figure some things out.

Tanya lets me go and takes a step back. She says, “These are really dangerous people. I think they’ve killed before.”

I don’t doubt her for a minute. I tell her, “Hey, I’m unkillable.”

I’m in the Z and buckling up when my cell rings. The screen tells me it’s my ex-wife. I could ignore it, but instead I answer with one of her favorite lines: “I’ve got a headache and I’m not in the mood.”

She says, “You need to come over here right away.” It’s 9:00 a.m. and she’s slurring her words.

“I don’t think so,” I tell her. I’ve seen her benders. She can get crazier than a bag full of rats in a burning meth lab, and I prefer to stay as far away as possible.

There’s a click, and my daughter picks up an extension. “Dad, for Christ’s sake, get me out of here.” She sounds desperate.

Allison screams, “You get off the line right now, you little bitch. Charlie, get your ass over here now and pick up your goddamn drug-addict daughter or I’m sending her to a lockdown in Montana. I’ve already got the paperwork.”

We’ve been through this before. The out-of-state facilities she’s researched are for hard-core addicts and juvenile offenders. Mindy’s fifteen and likes to smoke weed. I tell Allison I’m on my way.

Mindy survived our divorce and remained the A student she had always been right up until the end of middle school; then she got an older boyfriend, lost interest in grades, and stopped hanging out with her high-achiever friends. It didn’t help that her mother was getting loopier by the week, or that her dad was a drug addict that could only see her on alternate weekends. But our bond has remained intact and she appreciates that I accept her changes.

The 405 north to the Valley isn’t as bad as southbound traffic. I get a hint of nostalgia every time I drive out to my old house in Encino, but as I get closer I start to dread the encounter and realize that I can’t take Mindy with me. Living with her mom might be hell, but my own house doesn’t seem like a sane place to bring a teenager.

I pull into the driveway and there’s Mindy standing by the garage crying. I get out and she runs to me. Her hair is wild, her sunglasses skewed, and she has a bruise on her right cheek. I hug her for a moment and then hold her at arm’s length. I point to her bruise with my chin and say, “What’s that about?”

“Mom’s just completely fucking insane,” she tells me. The front door flies open and there’s Allison, looking splendid in a ratty bathrobe and, for some reason, high heels. She flings a suitcase in the air and we duck; it crashes on the hood of the Z, putting a nice dent in it.

“Next stop Montana,” she screams, “’cause you’re not gonna learn any fucking respect living at your loser dad’s.” And she goes in the house and slams the door.

“Sorry, Dad.” Mindy picks up her suitcase. I open the rear hatch and she tosses the case in. I guess she’s coming with me.

¤ ¤ ¤

We drive in silence for a while. My car is old, but I’ve got a new sound system with an iPod hookup and I put on John Hiatt singing “Feels Like Rain,” followed by Aaron Neville doing the same song.

Mindy says “I don’t know which one I like better, but the slide guitar on the second one is way cool.” We drive a few more miles in silence.

Finally, Mindy says, “She was trying to quit. She took a thirty-day chip at a meeting.”

“Must have been a painful month.”

“Yeah,” Mindy says. “But she hung in there.”

“No,” I say. “I mean for you.” Allison’s one of those drunks who gets even crazier when she stops drinking, and her relapses are inevitably spectacular.

“Yeah, well . . . Jeez, Dad, what am I gonna do?” I love Mindy with all my heart. Her tattoos, her crazy hair, her sanity and basic good nature, and the way she has never let her mother poison her with resentment toward me. But as to what she should do, I’m clueless.

“Well, it’s summer, so we don’t have to worry about school for a while. Why don’t we just take things one day at a time?” Fake it till you make it.

“I could test out of high school and go to City College if I stayed with you.” She’s smiling now, sold on her new future, shaking off the drama with her mother, and ready to settle in to her vision of
Life with Dad
. My cold, dead heart threatens to beat all on its own.

“We’ll see,” I tell her, and I pull into my driveway.

¤ ¤ ¤

We go in through the garage. I had chained the front door from the inside before leaving because the locks were broken. The house looks okay; the mess is the same as when I left. I show Mindy to the empty second bedroom and leave her to unpack. I go to my desk in the living room and inspect my computer. The hard drive is missing, so I get an old one from my closet and pop it in. I need Internet access.

When I Google “Jason Hamel gold” I get pages of hits, all on websites that, by their names, look dedicated to precious metals. The top listings include: “Returning to the Gold Standard,” “Gold is Money,” and “Jason Hamel’s Bible Prophecy Study on the Pre-Tribulation Rapture.” I click on this last one to see if it’s the same guy. Sure enough, the site kicks off with this: “The dollar bears the Mark of the Beast. You can convert your abominable paper money into honest money at findgold.com. Look for our ‘WORSHIP GOD’ 1 troy oz .999 fine rounds. Help your fellow Christians pave the way to return to honest money!”

Old Jason is certainly a man with a mission. I read on about the Mark of the Beast and world government, and how usury and printed money are Tools of Satan to subjugate free men. There’s a link to another site, called goldstockreport.com, so I click on that and get to a better-looking web page that seems to be more involved with the here and now. It’s got charts of gold and silver bullion performance over the last thirty days, and a list of recommended mining stocks. There’s a photo of a smiling, bespectacled man with silver hair and a tie printed with God’s hand reaching down from the sky; he’s beaming benevolence and Christian certitude. At the bottom is a banner showing silver coins with three crosses on a hill on one side and a monument with the Ten Commandments on the other; it turns out to be a link back to the Bible Prophecy site.

I try Googling “James Caffey geologist” and get a number of hits. Most of them point to a site called
The Motherlode Mining Bulletin
, which displays an “Error—Could Not Locate Remote Server” message. A Yahoo people search does show a James Caffey between West Hollywood and the Miracle Mile, so I jot down the address and phone number. When I search for the
Motherlode Bulletin
I get a few hits that don’t point to the defunct site. I click on one that takes me to TheGeoUpdate.com and an article about the shutting down of the
Motherlode
“due to the untimely deaths of both Caffey brothers earlier this summer.” I call the listed number for James Caffey.

The line rings three times. Four. Five. Okay, no voice mail. Must be someone old. Now a voice answers. A woman says, “Yes, who is it?” I don’t have a plan for this. I never have a plan. I tell her my name is Ron Harris and I’m with
LA City Beat
doing research for an article I’m writing. I have a fake press pass that says I work for
City Beat
. “How can I help you, Mr. Harris? I’m not really involved in public events. What’s the article about?”

“I’m doing a profile on a man named Jason Hamel. I understand your husband did some work with him a while back.” There’s a silence for so long that I finally say, “Hello? Mrs. Caffey?”

She clears her throat, a long phlegmy affair, and says, “Yes. I have a few things to say about Mr. Hamel. I can give you quite a story about him.”

I ask if I can come talk to her and when would be convenient. She tells me she’s got all the time in the world, but not much left. It’s noon and I’ve still got a few hours before I can go to Jimmy’s, so I say, “How about I drive down there now? I’m maybe twenty minutes away.”

Mrs. Caffey clears her throat again and tells me, “Fine. It’s about time someone showed some interest.”

I hear noise from the kitchen, so I go there and find Mindy bending over and looking in my fridge. She glances up at me and says, “Jeez, Dad, you live on beer and taco sauce? This bread looks like a biology experiment.” She straightens up and faces me, squints, and moves her head forward as if examining me. “And what’s with the clothes? And the sideways baseball cap? You look like a retarded Eminem fan.”

I guess it’s time to put on some of my own clothes. I tell Mindy to stay home and keep a cell phone with her at all times, and to speed-dial me if anything seems weird.

“What do you mean, ‘weird’? And where are you going?”

I tell her I’ve got some business to take care of and that my house was broken into. I don’t want to leave her, but I can’t take her with me and don’t want to scare her with the whole story. She shakes her head and says, “Fine.”

I change into some decent slacks and a dress shirt. I take a light sports jacket along for the interview. I check the side of my head in the mirror. The hole is screaming
Stick a finger in me or cover me up
. The cap stays. On my way out to the garage Mindy says, “Bye Dad. I love you.”

All a guy could ever ask for.