He got up and went to the kitchen to finish making his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Before he was done, he heard the burner’s generic ringtone in the other room. He left the sandwich on the counter and went to the phone. He didn’t recognize the number on the screen but assumed it was Cronyn’s cell phone or home number. He answered with one word spoken into the palm of his hand in an attempt to disguise it.
“Yes.”
“Why are you calling me? I’m not your contact.”
Bosch stood frozen. There it was. Cronyn obviously knew who Spencer was. The annoyed tone and the intimacy of what was said showed without a doubt that the lawyer knew who he was talking to.
“Hello?”
Bosch said nothing. He just listened. It sounded as though Cronyn was in a car, driving.
“Hello?”
For Bosch, there was something absolutely energizing about the moment and listening silently to Cronyn’s puzzled tone. Thanks to Cisco’s one-look view of the video, Bosch had now made the jump to the next level. He was closer to the frame.
Cronyn disconnected on his end and the line went silent.
20
Bosch drove down out of the hills and was sitting dead still behind a long line of red lights on the Barham overpass when he took a call back from Cisco.
“Hey, he’s on the move, and this time, I can tell, he’s looking for a tail.”
Bosch immediately surmised that Cronyn had made contact with Spencer by other means and learned that it had not been Spencer who had left the emergency message. Now the question was whether they had decided to meet somewhere or whether Spencer was simply trying to determine if he was being surveilled.
“Can you stay with him? I’m not going to get there in time. Traffic.”
“I can try but what is more important to you—to see where he’s going or to make sure I don’t get made? Tailing on a Harley has its drawbacks when the target’s on high alert. Namely, it’s loud.”
That was confirmed by the background sound. Bosch could hear the wind whistling into Cisco’s earpiece, as well as the baritone sounds of his bike’s illegal muffler.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, if I knew I was going to be doing this, I would have been prepped and I could’ve tagged his car, you know? Hung back on him. But I went straight from Greenblatt’s to downtown to make sure I didn’t miss him. Didn’t have the equipment.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m not blaming you. I’m thinking you should let him go. I think I just spooked them with a call I made. It confirms this guy’s part of this thing, so he might just be trying to see if he has a tail. Let him keep wondering.”
“He’s done a couple pullovers and rectangle moves.”
Bosch knew a rectangle move was when you took four rights around a block and came back to where you were. It usually revealed all followers.
“Then maybe you’ve already been made.”
“Nah, I didn’t fall for his bullshit. He’s an amateur. Right now I got him four blocks ahead on Marengo. You sure you want me to let him go?”
Bosch thought for a moment and second-guessed his first instincts. He was torn. He might be passing up an opportunity to see Spencer and Cronyn together. One photograph of such a meeting would blow the whole case open. If he texted that to Soto, she would rethink everything and there probably would be no hearing on vacating Borders’s sentence. But would Cronyn really be stupid enough to call for a meeting after getting the scam call from Bosch?
Harry didn’t think so. Spencer was up to something else.
“I changed my mind; stay on him,” he finally said. “Very loose. If you lose him, you lose him. Just don’t get made.”
“Got it. Did you hear from Mick yet?”
“No. About what?”
“He’s got more on this guy’s mortgage. Some good stuff and maybe an angle to play. At least that’s what he said.”
“I’ll call him. Let me know about Spencer. And thanks for jumping in on this, Cisco.”
“What I do.”
“Call me if you figure out what he’s up to.”
They disconnected and Bosch called Haller next.
“I was just on with Cisco. He said you have some good stuff.”
“You bet. My girl Lorna has kicked some major ass on this. She was able to pull up the foreclosure record and I think crack this thing open.”
“Tell me.”
“I have to make a quick search on the computer first and then I’ll have everything. You want to catch dinner in a bit and talk then?”
“Yeah. Where?”
“I feel like pot roast. You ever been to Jar?”
“Yeah, I like eating at the counter there.”
“Of course, you’re a counter sort of guy. You’re like the guy sitting by himself in that Hopper painting.”
“I’ll see you at Jar. When?”
“Half an hour.”
Bosch disconnected. He wondered if there was some kind of psychic connection between himself and his half brother. He had often considered himself to be like that man at the counter in Hopper’s Nighthawks.
He realized that he had not moved on the overpass in nearly ten minutes. Something was wrong up ahead on Barham. The cars were lined up all around the bend where it went down into Burbank and the Warner’s lot. He reached over, opened his glove compartment, and looked at the mobile police light. Because he was only a reserve officer at SFPD, he was not given a city ride. In lieu of that, he had been given the blue strobe light he could throw on the roof of his personal car, but it came with the proviso that it not be used unless Bosch was inside the bounds of San Fernando.
“Fuck it,” he said.
He grabbed the light and put it out through the window and up onto the roof, a magnet on the bottom holding it in place. He plugged the juice line into the cigarette lighter and started seeing the flashing blue light reflecting off the rear window of the car in front of him. The car blocking his way inched forward enough for Bosch to make a U-turn and head back to Cahuenga Boulevard. Cars stopped at the intersection and he breezed through. He started heading south.
After he slipped by the Hollywood Bowl and onto Franklin, the traffic slackened off enough for Bosch to pull the plug out of the cigarette lighter. He got to Jar, down on Beverly, well ahead of Haller, and he took one of the stools at the counter. He was nursing his first martini when Haller came through the door fifteen minutes later. He asked for a table in the corner of the dining room for privacy. Bosch followed with his martini.
Haller matched Bosch’s drink order and got down to business as soon as they were alone.
“I like the way you put my investigator to work without consulting me,” he said.
“Hey, I’m the client here,” Bosch retorted. “You’re working for me and that means he works for me too.”
“I’m not sure I agree with that logic, but it is what it is. You’re going to love what we’ve got.”
“Cisco filled me in on some of it.”
“Not the really good stuff.”
“So tell me.”
Haller waited for his martini to be put down in front of him. The waiter was also about to hand out menus, when he was cut off with a wave of Haller’s hand.
“Two orders of pot roast and a side of duck fried rice,” Haller said.
“Perfect,” said the waiter.
He went away.
“I like the way you order for me without consulting me first,” Bosch said.
“Must be something in our father’s blood,” Haller said.
“I actually already ate a sandwich.”
“So eat again—this is the good stuff. Anyway, I don’t know if you remember this but during the mortgage crisis, I shifted a lot of my business over to foreclosure defense. I made out, too. Remember, I hired Jennifer Aronson as an associate and we made some good money for a few years there.”
“I remember something about that, yeah.”
“Well, that’s my way of telling you I know the
ins and outs of that illustrious time in our nation’s financial history. I wasn’t the only one making bank and I know how others made out as well.”
“Okay, so what’s it have to do with our man Spencer?”
“His foreclosure suit is public record. You just need to know how to find it, and lucky for us, Lorna does. So I’ve spent the past hour with it and, like I said, you’re going to like it. Check that. Love it.”
“So get to it. What do you have?”
“Spencer got in over his head. He bought the house in two thousand, saw it go up in value, and pulled the value out in a home-equity loan six years later. I don’t know what he did with the money but he didn’t put enough aside to pay his now two mortgages. He then took the first step down the road of desperation. He combined those two loans into a single refi with one reasonable payment on an adjustable rate.”
“And let me guess, it didn’t solve anything.”
“No, in many ways it made matters worse. He can’t keep up and then the crash happens and he is circling the drain financially. He gets so far upside down on his mortgage he’s breathing dirt. He stops making payments altogether and the bank starts foreclosure proceedings. He does a smart thing and hires a lawyer. The only thing is, he hired the wrong lawyer.”
“He should have hired you, is that what you’re saying?”
“Well, it couldn’t have hurt. The lawyer he does hire doesn’t really know what she’s doing, because she’s like all the other lawyers in town and jumping into the foreclosure business with both feet.”
“Like you.”
“Like me. I mean, paid criminal defense work dried up. Nobody had any money. I was taking referrals from the public defender and working for chump change. I couldn’t even make my child-support payments on time. So I went into foreclosure work. But I did my goddamn homework on it, and I hired a smart young associate out of the kind of law school that puts a chip on your shoulder and gives you something to prove.”
“Okay, I get it, you did it right and Spencer’s lawyer did it wrong. What happened?”
“Well, the one thing she got right was the assessment that a legitimate bank wasn’t going to touch Spencer’s dumb ass. So she puts him into hard money.”
“What’s hard money?”
“It doesn’t come from a bank. It comes from investor pools, and because it’s not a bank, they charge points up front and interest rates above market—sometimes damn close to the rates the mafia guys charge for money on the street.”
“And so Spencer’s problems only got worse.”
“Oh, yeah. This poor guy’s trying to hold on to his house and make his payments. Meantime, he’s sitting on a big fat seven-year balloon. And guess what, that balloon is about to pop.”
“Back up and speak English. I paid off my house twelve years ago. I don’t know what any of this means. What’s the balloon?”
“Spencer made a deal with an investor pool called Rosebud Financial. I heard about them back then, that they had money to bail people out. Supposedly it came from a bunch of guys in Hollywood and it was run by another guy, named Ron Rogers, a real shark. He cut these deals and didn’t care whether the taker could pay or not. If there was enough bottom-line equity in the property, he’d cut the deal, because he knew he’d get two shots at foreclosure: either when the poor slob homeowner couldn’t make his monthly payments or at the end of the term, when there was a balloon payment for the balance.”
“So, the deal is, you pay these high monthlies, and then at the end you still have to pay off the whole note.”
“Exactly. These hard-money deals were short-term mostly. Two years, five years. Spencer got a seven-year deal, which was pretty long, but the seven years is up in July and he’ll owe all the money.”
“Can’t he now go to a real bank and refinance again? The financial markets are pretty good now.”
“He could but he’s fucked. His credit rating is shit and Rosebud Financial is putting the boots to him. They’ve dinged him every time he pays late by a week. You see? They want to put him in a corner. They know he’s got no money to pay the balloon and he can’t refinance the debt because of his record. In July they’re going to take the house from him. And this is where it gets good. You know what Zillow is?”
“Zillow? No.”
“It’s an online real-estate database. You can plug in a property address and get a ballpark valuation based on neighborhood comps and other factors. That was the thing I had to check before we talked, and sure enough, Spencer’s property comes in at high six figures—almost a million bucks.”
“Then why doesn’t he just sell it, pay off the balloon, and walk away with the profit?”
“Because he can’t. That deal he cut with Rosebud requires company approval before a sale can be made. And that’s where he hired the wrong lawyer. The fine print on the contract—she either didn’t read it, didn’t understand it, or didn’t care. She just wanted to put him into that loan and move on, maybe even getting a kickback in the process.”
“Rosebud’s not letting him sell.”
“That’s correct.”
“So, they won’t let him sell. He can’t pay the balloon. Rosebud’s going to take the house, sell it, and split the profits among the Hollywood investors.”
“You’re getting good at this, Bosch.”
Bosch sipped the last of his martini and thought about the scenario. Spencer was facing the loss of his house unless he could come up with more than a half million in cash to pay off the balloon. If that didn’t make him vulnerable to corruption, nothing would.
Haller sipped his martini and nodded as he watched Bosch track it all. Then he smiled.
“I saved the kicker for last,” he said.
“What?” Bosch asked.
“Spencer’s lawyer? The dumb one? Her name was Kathy Zelden. I knew her back in those days. She was a junior lawyer in a small firm, and her boss would send her to the courthouse the first Monday of every month, because that’s when they published the foreclosures list. I was there, she was there, Roger Mills, a bunch of us—first Monday of every month. We’d buy a copy of the list and then the flyers would go out in the mail. ‘In foreclosure? Call the Lincoln Lawyer.’ Like that. Everybody on the list got flyers in the mail, phone calls, e-mails, the works. That’s how I got most of my clients.”
“That’s your kicker?”
“No, the kicker is that I’m talking seven, eight, years ago, when I knew her as Kathy Zelden. She was a real looker, and a year or two later her boss got his hand caught in her cookie jar. It was a mini-scandal. He ended up divorcing his wife of like twenty-five years and marrying Kathy. So the last five years, Kathy Zelden’s been known as Kathy Cronyn.”
Haller held up his glass for a well-earned toast. Bosch was empty but he took his glass and banged it hard enough to draw attention from nearby tables.
“Holy shit,” he said. “We got ’em.”
“We fucking-A do,” Haller said. “I am going to blow their shit right out of the water when we get to that hearing next week.”
He drained his glass just as the waiter brought their dishes of pot roast and duck fried rice.
“Gentlemen,” the waiter said. “It looks like we are in need of more essential vitamins.”
Haller picked up his empty glass and offered it.
“We definitely are,” he said. “We definitely are.”
21
After the pot roast and fried rice, Bosch and Haller tried to piece things together. They agreed that the whole scheme likely started when Spencer, facing the upcoming balloon payment with no money and no approval to sell his home, went to the lawyer who put him into the Rosebud deal: Kathy Cronyn née Zelden.
“She says, ‘Sorry, pal, but next year that balloon is going to pop and you’re going to be fucked,’” Haller said. “‘But let me introduce you to my husband and law partner. There might be a way for you to get the money you need before July.’ She makes the intro, and Lance tells him that all he h
as to do is figure out how to get something into one of the sealed boxes in that big warehouse where he works. Guys like Spencer probably sit around on their breaks talking about ways to defeat the system. Idle work gossip becomes a real thing and the way out of the mess he’s in.”
“We still have to figure that out,” Bosch said.
“My guess is that when all of this hits the fan, Spencer’s going to cut a deal and tell us exactly how he did it. If he hires the right lawyer this time, he can probably come out of this looking like a victim. Everybody likes the lawyer for the villain. The D.A. will trade Spencer for Cronyn and Cronyn in a heartbeat.”
“Spencer’s no victim. He’s part of the frame. He’s trying to put me in the dirt.”
“I know that. I’m just giving you the reality of it. How it will play out. Spencer’s a guy who got in over his head and was played by these people.”
“Then we should go at him now. Confront him, show him the video. Get him on our side before next week.”
“Might be worth a try, but if he doesn’t crack, then we’re giving Lance Cronyn a head start on Wednesday. I’d rather sandbag the whole bunch of them in the courtroom.”
Bosch nodded. It was probably the better plan. Just then, thoughts of confronting Spencer reminded him that the property officer was currently under surveillance. He pulled his phone.
“I forgot about Cisco,” he said. “He’s watching him right now.”
Bosch made the call and Cisco answered with a whisper.
“What’s happening?” Bosch asked.
“He drove around for an hour until he was sure he had no tail,” Cisco said. “Then he drove down into Pasadena and met somebody—a woman—in the parking lot of Vroman’s.”
“What’s Vroman’s?”
“It’s a big bookstore with a big parking lot at the edge of Old Town. They’re parked window to window, you know, like cops do.”