10
KLEIN WATCHED THE hillsides through the window. He knew it was crazy, but something inside him, almost like a memory, whispered that at any moment she would appear. He’d been waiting for her, expecting her. He could picture her face clearly—the pale porcelain cast of her skin, her dark eyes and hair. Her name flitted into his head without his making any conscious effort to invent one for her, as if he had always known it.
The wind fell suddenly, and the shadows and trees were still, the hills empty. He imagined it was dark, late at night, the moon high in the sky over the ridge. Heavy with expectation, he walked toward the hills through the high grass. She appeared in the moonlight, and he went out to meet her, taking her hand and leading her to a room that smelled like pine and wool and tallow. Her clothes were a puzzle of ties and buttons, but with practiced hands he undressed her, the two of them moving together slowly in the sepia-toned candlelight….
When the telephone rang he nearly knocked it onto the floor. It took a moment for him to recognize Pomeroy’s voice.
“I think we’ve got a live one out at the end of the road,” Pomeroy said.
“Which cabin?” Klein forced himself to look at the countertop, to yank his eyes and his mind around to business and away from the windy hillside.
“Thirty-five,” Pomeroy said.
“They settled on a price?”
“Nope.”
“You make any kind of offer?”
“Nope.”
Klein waited. He did a lot of waiting when he talked to Pomeroy, whose pronouncements were full of pauses that seemed to imply things, except that Klein never knew if the pauses implied stupidity or secret knowledge. “So what did you tell them?” he asked, finally giving in. Two points for you, he thought.
“I told the woman to talk it over with her husband. My idea is to drive back out there in a couple of days, after they’ve had time to get worked up, and tell them I’m not interested. Then one of the new fronts can pick it up.”
“All right,” Klein said. “I’ll go for that. Give me the name and phone number.”
After listening for a moment he hung up the phone and shook his head, immediately punching in a number. The phone rang three times before a man picked up at the other end and said, “Callaway.”
“Bob, this is Lance Klein, calling about that little real estate deal we talked about at the Spanglers’ party. That’s right,” Klein said. “She was a riot, wasn’t she? I am a lucky man. You don’t know the half of it. Anyway, about that little deal, it’s easy money, payment up front.”
Klein nodded at the phone, peering out at the hills again. “Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ve got the particulars if you’re interested. That’s right. Vacation home out here in the canyon, party name of Monroe. They’ve got a year-round home in Southgate.”
KLEIN LOVE THE view from the backyard, especially on a clear, windy day. The Japanese had the idea that you should build your house so that you couldn’t see the view, so that you had to go looking for it. You wouldn’t lose your appreciation of it that way. Sometimes the Japanese were purely full of crap.
Klein had cut, filled, surveyed, and built on the hills a hundred times in his head. It was a sort of mental exercise—creative thinking. Up behind the house there was a gradual slope for something like two hundred yards. Put in quarter-acre lots, ranch-style homes done right—plank floors, rock fireplaces, plenty of wood-frame windows. Nothing fake.
Call it “The Woods” or “Country Acres.” Put out a couple of billboards along the Santa Ana Freeway—a painting of oak trees, the sun coming up, a creek, green grass, maybe a family of people hand in hand, watching the sunrise. Never mind that in ten years there wouldn’t be any “country” left out here except for a few strips of what was sometimes called “green belt” by the used car salesmen who passed for city planners.
But then you didn’t sell people with the truth. Not with that kind of truth, anyway. There was a bigger truth that had to do with inevitability. The best you could do was give people something for their money. They were on their way right now, those people were, getting out of the goddamn city, trying to find a little bit of breathable air. That’s what the guy with the bumper sticker didn’t get. You couldn’t leave the canyons to the lions, not forever.
Prices were skyrocketing out in the foothills. A couple of years ago you could buy up a lot with a house on it for sixty thousand bucks. A hundred thousand would buy you a buildable acre. But those days were gone forever, and any serious real estate considerations, even out on the fringes of the county, were strictly for high rollers.
There was a lot of federally owned land in the county, though. The Cleveland National Forest stretched across most of the Santa Ana Mountains, and swallowed all of upper Trabuco Canyon. Most of it was wilderness. A dirt road ran back into the canyon, open to traffic for five miles or so. Some forty cabins were hidden back up in there, in Trabuco itself and in Holy Jim Canyon, which branched off and ran up toward Santiago Peak.
Right now you could buy one of those cabins for pocket change. The same cabin in Modjeska, or in the little town of Trabuco Oaks, could set you back a couple hundred thousand. What accounted for that was partly that you couldn’t buy the land out in the canyon. You got it for twenty years, and then had to renew the lease. Built into the lease was what the Forest Service called a “higher use” clause, which meant that the fed could buy you out at market value if they wanted to put the land to some other purpose—like a park.
Also, there was no electricity or phone out there. Water was sketchy, especially in drought years. What was worst was the bone-wrenching dirt road, full of potholes, that ran up into the canyon. Nobody went back in there casually. Klein would bet money that there wasn’t one person out of a hundred in the county that even knew the place existed. Probably one in a thousand.
But it wouldn’t take much to change that. Pave the road, say, and run a wire back in there, and suddenly, very damned suddenly, you could put your pocket change away.
In fact, Klein’s canyon enterprise operated on the brink of outright fraud. He wouldn’t have used that word in the company of any of the consortium of investors and front men that he’d managed to peg together over the past months, but he had never been one to fool himself.
Just as soon as the county announced its intention of turning upper Trabuco Canyon into a wildlife park, something was going to happen to the value of the cabins back in there—something big. There were two ways it could go. The county could upgrade the road and run power into the area, and the value of all those fifteen-thousand-dollar hovels would increase tenfold overnight, literally. Or else the Forest Service would implement the “higher use” clause and eminent-domain the places, paying the owners off at market value.
Klein was betting on the second scenario. There were only the forty cabins back in there, in Holy Jim and Trabuco canyons combined—pocket money for the government no matter what happened to market value.
Somebody was going to make a piece of change, and the taxpayer was going to take it on the chin.
So far, Klein and his “consortium,” as he liked to call them, had made offers on twelve cabins and had actually picked up six of them. It was Pomeroy’s job to hunt for more, and then, when he found a possible sale, Klein passed the name on to someone willing to front for the consortium for a flat fee. You were prohibited by law from holding more than one lease, and that’s why he needed the fronts— there were only a handful of investors altogether, looking to pick up something like twenty properties. Anyway, the consortium would ante up the money to buy each cabin and pay the front a flat fee to hold the lease.
Most of the longtime canyon residents had picked the places up years ago for six or eight or ten thousand bucks. If you offered them twice that they crumpled. Once you transferred the leases and picked up bills of sale, you sold the places back and forth among yourselves and drove the prices through the roof. In the end you’d divvy up, with a brokerage fee for Klein on top of his share.
If you were quick and clean and smart, you’d all walk away happy when the government bought you out. If you weren’t, then the government would smell something— fraud, to be exact.