C. Reiss - Spin

“I’m about to,” he said. “Now, Margaret, stop bullying her. You’re being bitter.”

“Fuck you.”

He turned to me. “Theresa, tell me about those buildings. Open permits? Zoning changes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Calls to the police about squatters? Still water?”

“I don’t know.”

“Complaints to Building and Safety?”

“Should I be making a list?”

He pushed his plate aside and put his elbows on the table. “If they’re warehousing property, they’d raze the structures to get rid of the reporting problems. Then they’d just build an ugly apartment building when they had the land they needed. But they’re keeping fire and liability traps standing. And that neighborhood... there’s no way some kids won’t use those buildings for business and burn the places down cooking meth.”

“Who the fuck cares?” Margie moaned.

“Real estate fraud isn’t covered under RICO, so they won’t be federally prosecuted if they get caught doing whatever they’re doing. You’d have mentioned that if you weren’t busy giving her a hard fucking time.”

“I’m trying to discourage her.”

“Something’s going on with those buildings, Theresa,” he said. “Get your man to figure out what it is.”

“Great idea.” Margie put her napkin on the table and stood. “Encourage her. I’m going to the ladies’. By the time I get back, I expect bullets through the window.”

We watched her stride across the room.

I sighed. “She thinks I’m made of sugar.” I pushed my salad around my plate. Jonathan didn’t say anything, and I didn’t realize he was staring at me until I looked up.

“What’s going on?” he asked as if he expected an answer. As if “nothing” wouldn’t cut it.

We knew each other too well. As kids, the eight of us had had the option of banding together or falling apart. As a result, the youngest and the oldest had wound into two cliques, held together on the spool of Margie.

“Is this your way of getting him back?” Jonathan said. “Keeping an eye on him?”

The silence between us became long and tense, but he wouldn’t give an inch. I thought Margie had gone to the bathroom in Peru.

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

“Go on.”

“There’s someone else. I won’t talk about it more.”

“Ah.” He leaned back. “Use someone else as a threat, and then he tries to get you back with these books as an excuse? You’re a tactician. I forgot to thank you for your suggestion to bring a woman I wasn’t related to. Worked.”

“Really? Jessica came back? That’s amazing.”

“Yes, but I don’t want her. I’m keeping the new one. Unexpected upside.”

I was stunned into silence. He’d let go of something he’d been holding onto for a long time. “What happened to change your mind?”

“It was just gone. Whatever was there. Poof, gone. And for a while, too. Which is great, but neither of them is going to get me killed. You? You’re getting deep in shit.”

I didn’t want to say another word about it because I didn’t want to spin out of control. I just wanted to find out about Antonio without asking him questions.

“You speak Italian, right?” I said.

“Yes.”

He spoke everything. It was his gift.

“ Come vuoi tu. What does that mean?”

“Kind of ‘as you wish,’ more or less. Why?”

“Pledge closed,” I said.

“Fine. Pledge closed.”

Margie came up behind us. “Closing pledge. Who wants coffee?”

Like every other part of central and eastern Los Angeles, Mount Washington was facing a real estate renaissance. Yet that particular hill seemed to have been passed over. The commercial district was a row of empty storefronts with gates pulled shut, broken glass, some burned out, and most graffitied over. Five blocks of third-world devastation stretched in either direction. I turned left up the hill, cracked asphalt bouncing my little car. The sidewalks ended under deep, thorny underbrush. Even at nine in the morning, I heard the beats of someone’s music on the other side of the hill.

A right, then another left, and I found an eight-foot high chain-link fence stretched around a hairpin turn and up the hill. Across the street, another fence. The buildings were overgrown, unkempt, with peeling stucco and beams warped under the passion flower vines. When I opened my car door, an avocado with the squirrel-sized bite rolled down the hill with a skit skit skoot , popping up on a crack in the pavement and landing on the asphalt. I looked up. A cloud-high avocado tree shaded the block, spitting its bounty onto the sidewalk.

I shut the door. My car made a familiar chirp that alerted the neighborhood that something expensive was nearby. I glanced back at it then forward.

The late Frankie Giraldi had bought everything behind those fences, from what I could tell, but one house he’d bought first. He’d purchased it as an individual. Years later, his estate had moved it into trust and bought up everything around it.

The executor of the trust was the law firm of Mansiatti, Rowenstein, and Karo. Antonio Spinelli, Esq., LLP had bought them when they went belly up. They had one client: the Frank Giraldi estate. A snake eating itself. The estate’s trust owned the property, and Antonio managed the trust. Did he actually own it outright? I couldn’t tell from the papers I’d had in front of me.

The overgrowth detonated my allergies. I felt my sinuses swell and press against the bones of my face. A drip tickled the back of my nose. I checked my bag. Advil, tampons, wet wipes, and an empty tissue packet. Great. The tickle worked its way to the back of my throat. I put my hand in front of my mouth, checked to see if anyone was around, and made a very unladylike noise to scratch my throat as I walked down the block.

I found the house. I was allergic to just about everything growing around it.

I didn’t know what I’d expected, but there was nothing but a run down, bright yellow house with a fifty-foot front yard. An old Fiat was parked on top of rosebush stumps. Stacks of faded children’s toys pressed against the fence. Bars on the windows. A porch stacked with bags of leaves. The driveway had been kept clear though, which meant someone came in and out often enough to need a path. A few steps to the right, I saw muddy tire tracks from something bigger than a car.

The entrance to the drive had been chained shut. Though a hole had been cut in the fence at the next dilapidated house, it had been repaired with sharp twists of wire. I walked on a few feet and found a new opening.

I crawled through it. A thorny strand of brush found my stocking and gave it a good yank. I had an extra pair in the car, but I was still anxious about the drooping egg shape at my calf. Pushing past bamboo, bushes with sticky burrs, and tall weeds with yellow flowers that I knew tasted like broccoli, I came out into the end of the driveway, at the front end of the backyard.

The house had been built into a hill, so the backyard was at a slant, the square footage taken up by a slope that got more vertical as it bent away from the house. The structure itself was no surprise, with its beaten yellow paint and bent eaves. But the fence surprised me. Though the barriers from the street were old, hand-repaired chain link, the fences between the properties were new.

A loud crack echoed off the mountain. It could have been anything. A car backfiring. A piece of lumber snapping. Even a shotgun.

A smack of fear in my lower back sent me rushing through the bamboo and mustard weeds and through the hole in the fence, leaving behind strands of nylon for the thorns. I ran down the block and hurled myself at my car, almost twisting my ankle. The car blooped and I got in, turning the key before buckling. A drip of snot freed itself from my left sinus.