Diamonds and Cole (7 page)

Cole felt like he was reading somebody else’s mail as he skimmed through the article. It was obvious that the writer wasn’t anywhere near finished. She had brackets around sentences and phrases, triple spaced sections, paragraphs in red, and spell check hadn’t been run in a long time, if ever. She was trying to seem edgy without saying anything the paper could get sued over. Christopher was mentioned twice as
the Realtor with the Most Negative Responses
.

Cole had seen all he needed.

“Here you go. It’s not ours. I linked to a news browser that’s like an electronic clipping service. Quite a file.”

Another folder popped up on Cole’s monitor. The first file was all he needed: “Malcor Mob Ties Once Again Investigated.” Too much money, too few liabilities, and too few projects in the works had the Feds interested. The article painted a picture of a not-too-cleverly concealed attempt by the mob to filter moneys into a legitimate business. They had purchased Malcor seven years before, then sat on it...until that last couple of years, when it suddenly was turning big profits for no apparent reason.

It’s hard to think legitimate when you are used to breaking the law, so why not move west, find some fresh faces, start some new ventures, and hire some clean managers and a board of directors with no ties to the mob? Smart on the surface, but they never think about the origins of the start-up capital. Gets them every time.

“Think I got what I need. You’ve got a great resource here. I hope they appreciate your talents.”

“This is but a stop on the road to riches and fame, Mr. Sage, a stop on the road.” Randy did what he considered a good imitation of a wise old philosopher.

“So what’s the coolest thing all this stuff can do?”

“Stand back about six or eight feet and watch!”

Cole did as instructed. All six of the 26” monitors went black. Like a bolt of hallucinogenic lightning, the screens exploded with color. The music of a soaring rock band backed by a symphony orchestra thundered from in front and behind in response to the visuals; A panorama of ocean waves, birds in flight, aerial views of the Grand Canyon, sailing on San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate, skydiving toward earth and then zooming out to a shot of Earth from space. The pictures jumped from screen to screen and did synchronized patterns like the water fountain at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It was astounding!

Then the monitors all went black again. The silence was almost as deafening as the sound had been.

“That was amazing!” Cole shouted.

“Thought you’d like it.” Randy beamed like a kid showing off his new toy—and that’s exactly what he was.

“Randy, you are a wonder. It has been a real kick meeting you. If you are ever in Chicago, come by
The Sentinel
and I’ll introduce you to some people. I’m not kidding, we’ve got to get you out of this dungeon.” Cole offered his hand to the young man, remembered Randy’s misshapen one and quickly offered his left. Randy nodded a look of appreciation and shook Cole’s hand firmly.

“You just might see me someday.”

“I’ll take that as a promise.” Cole patted Randy’s shoulder. “I’ll let know if I dig up anything of interest.”

Cole returned to the Palmwood and looked up Allen Christopher in the phone book he found in the desk drawer, scribbling the number and address on a notepad. Tomorrow, he would make a call on Mr. Christopher. As he lay back across the bed, Cole replayed the day’s events in his head. He had covered a lot of ground since he left Chicago, and he was starting to feel the effects. His sadness about Ellie had been masked by their talk and laughter for a while. The best thing to do was get busy finding Erin. He wouldn’t let himself dwell on Ellie’s condition.
She was just sick
, he told himself, but he knew it was more than that. He had a chance to do something for her, something her husband wouldn’t. He would not let her down.

SIX

Cole woke late. Dressed in jeans, a Chicago Blues Festival T-shirt and a Cubs baseball cap, he made his way to the street and walked to the McDonalds on the corner. Two Egg McMuffins later, coffee in hand, he walked back to his car in the Palmwood lot. Cole pulled the address for Allen Christopher from his pocket. To his embarrassment, he realized he had no clue where the location was. He went to the motel office and got a city map from the desk clerk. He followed the map toward 1438 Peppertree Lane.

As he drove north, he was amazed at the landscape. Where peach trees and grapevines had once lined the road, now were rows and rows of houses. New building was apparent all over the city, but nowhere as dramatic as in the north end. In the few short miles he had driven, the houses he saw had taken over a dozen family-owned farms. He thought of the kids he had known and rode the school bus with, farm kids who always got on the bus wearing the newest styles. They always had the coolest bikes and wore the coolest shoes. In high school, they proudly wore the royal blue corduroy FFA jackets and took Ag classes. It was assumed they would inherit the farms, grow the peaches, and tend the vineyards. Now the farms were gone. Cole wondered what kind of family history the owners of the earth-toned two-story Tudors and fake ‘40s retro homes presented to the world.

He stopped at the corner of Tulare and Emmett Roads and marveled at the small shopping center that filled the northeast corner. A small market, video store, take-and-bake pizza, dry cleaner, and a Mexican restaurant sat on the land where his friend Steve had once lived with his aunt and uncle. Old Leo would be spinning in his grave to see what became of his prized orchard of Rio Oso Gem peaches.

Cole thought back to summers in high school and evenings spent with the Padullas. Uncle Leo would bring fresh peaches from the orchard. He grew an experimental variety that were developed at the University of California at Davis. Designed to be frozen, they were sweet, fleshy fruit with, as Cole remembered, an exaggerated peach taste. The thing he would never forget, though, was the size. Aunt Rosa once ran to the copper-toned refrigerator, took out a cantaloupe, and laid it on the table next to a peach. They were the same size. Every night during peach season, the family would gather after dinner and cut a giant peach in half, peel it, and put a single scoop of vanilla ice cream in the cavernous hole left by the pit. Cole’s mouth actually watered at the memory.

He also recalled how Rosa was always reading a book when he’d come in. Cole’s strongest image of Rosa was the day they came in as she was reading
The Godfather.
He could see the slightly bent Italian lady, arms waving, dentures slipping, spit flying, telling how the Mafia in Sicily had threatened her father’s brother and somebody-or-other, and that’s why they had come to America. “La Cosa Nostra, La Cosa Nostra,” she repeated over and over throughout the story. She was absolutely convinced that the story of the Corleone family was a thinly disguised account of a real Mafia family in New York that was still looking for her descendants who had escaped Sicily by the grace of Saint Teresa.

A truck’s air horn blasted Cole out of his reverie. The light changed and with it his memories. No longer in the quiet countryside of his youth, the unforgiving traffic reminded him of that. Jolted back to the present, Cole floored the accelerator, shot into the intersection, and made the left turn toward Vintage Glenn Estates.

The one constant in the landscape was irrigation canals. Every mile or so, there was a small bridge over a concrete river. As a kid, Cole and everyone he knew swam in them. Now, they looked very small and dirty, and would be the last places he would take a cool dip on a 100-plus summer day.

The reality of where he was going and what he was about to do began to form a knot in Cole’s stomach. His first thoughts about meeting Allen Christopher were violent and colored in blood. Cole knew that was not the path he would take, but playing through scenes of bludgeoning Christopher with various objects helped vent his anger. He tried a litany of curses and profane names in his mental role-playing that helped hone the edge of his hatred for what this man had done to Ellie. What he would actually say and do were as much a mystery to Cole as the reason he was driving “out in the country” to see him.

Ahead on the left, Cole spotted a tall stone fence that curved into what the sign called “Vintage Glenn Estates, The Place to Be Who You Really Are.” This place would be who Allen Christopher really was, because it wasn’t the house he shared with Ellie. When they were first married, Ellie told Cole they had bought a single-story Victorian house built in the ‘20s. It was on a tree-lined street in the old part of town, across from a large park. Ellie described the things she had done with it, the way she had decorated. She was so proud, that she always had a Charles Dickens Christmas party during the holidays. She had confided to Cole that, as bad as her marriage was, she still took great pride in her home and her lovely things. Cole was sure she didn’t know that Christopher had sold the house.

Cole drove through the stone gates of Vintage Glenn Estates and found Peppertree Lane with no trouble; 1438 was in the middle of the block. The garage door was up, and the interior was nearly void of the stuff that usually crowds out all but the smallest car. The landscaping was obviously new; there were lines in the sod where it hadn’t grown together. Cole pulled up across the street.

A young man in a pair of baggy shorts and a faded blue T-shirt was coming out of the garage. An early ‘80s BMW was parked in front of the house behind a fairly new Mustang. In the driveway was a new Mercedes Benz. A young couple with a stroller passed Cole on the sidewalk and gave him a less-than-neighborly glare. He waved and smiled.

A door on the rear wall of the garage was open, giving Cole a straight shot into the backyard. As he watched, a young woman in sweatpants and a tank top walked by the door several times with a shovel. The young man who Cole took for Chad pushed a wheelbarrow full of peat moss behind the young woman who must have been his sister Ann. Then, there he was, Allen Christopher, carrying a sapling tree in a five-gallon pot.

Cole got out of the car and crossed the street. He had never seen such an empty, sterile garage in his life. The walls were taped and textured, but not painted. A small stack of paint cans, probably for touch up, sat in the corner. A recycling bin was on the wall opposite the water heater, and a snowboard and two pairs of skis were hung on the right wall. On the wall next to the rear door was a white plastic sign that said “Mercedes Benz Parking Only.” The floor was swept clean, the broom leaning strangely out of place next to a door that led into the house. Cole walked into the backyard.

“When’d you move in?” Cole said, trying to sound friendly.

“We’re not buying anything!” Christopher called across the yard.

“Not selling anything.” Cole’s tone cooled.

Christopher set down the tree he was carrying and removed his leather garden gloves. The children gave Cole a blank, disinterested glance and went back to spreading peat in the planter. As he crossed the yard, Christopher shoved the gloves into the back pocket of his cargo shorts. Allen Christopher was not what Cole had envisioned. He was taller than Cole, thinner, and had more hair.

All his life, Cole had found too-neat people very suspect. Maybe it was a vanity thing— theirs, not his. Cole always felt haircuts were a nuisance, something that you did a couple weeks after it was absolutely necessary. Allen Christopher, in Cole’s eyes, was coiffured. He had a George Hamilton tan and the look of the guys at the gym who watched themselves in the mirrored walls as they jogged on the treadmill. Christopher approached, pushing his sunglasses back on the top of his head, holding back thick, probably dyed, hair. (Yet another pet peeve of Cole’s. Men just didn’t do that.) Even without his resentment of Christopher’s treatment of Ellie, Cole wasn’t going to like this guy.

“What do you want?” Christopher asked coldly.

“That’s not very friendly.”

“I don’t like strangers in my backyard.”

“Not very neighborly, either,” Cole said, trying to appear friendly.

“Are you my neighbor?” Christopher’s confidence seemed momentarily stalled.

“No, but I might have been. If I had been, I would have been very disappointed in my reception. My name is Cole Sage, I’m an—”

“Cole Sage? I know who you are,” Christopher cut him off. “Same question. What do you want?”

Cole considered the overwhelming urge to punch Christopher in the nose. He flashed back on all the things he had said when he had role-played this scene in his head. Then he thought of Ellie and resisted both.

“I saw Ellie yesterday.”

“So?”

“You know, I thought I was just going to pay you a friendly visit. Try to sort a few things out.”

“We’re not friends. You mean nothing to me. Neither do the mythical romantic adventures I’ve been forced to endure hearing for years.”

Cole took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Ellie and I are old friends. She seemed in some distress and called me for some assistance,” Cole said, trying to remain calm. “I simply wanted to see—”

“Ellen is none of your concern. She is my wife. She is terminally ill and is being taken care of. Whatever she told you is no business of yours, and I would thank you to stay away from her.” Christopher’s voice was now just below a shout.

“Like you’ve done?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Cole saw Chad approaching on his left. He had none of his father’s concern about appearance. His thin wispy hair came almost to his shoulders and needed to be washed. From his temples to his chin ran the raw, over-pinched signs of untreated acne. Chad wore a sweaty faded T-shirt with the words “Island of LESBOS—Every Man’s Dream” across the chest. Cole thought he looked sweatier than his activity could have produced. As Chad got closer, Cole recognized the acrid stench of a methamphetamine user.

“This guy givin’ you trouble, Dad?” Chad said, trying to stand with a threatening posture.