Page 67 of Your Every Wish
“The good part? About how a developer could buy Cedar Pines and mow the place to the ground? And Sheila sucks.”
“What do you mean she sucks?”
“You told her we were coming. She had plenty of time to prepare. She should’ve had a list of comps for you and a concrete number. That’s why we went there in the first place, isn’t it? To find out what Cedar Pines Estates is worth.”
Kennedy unlocks the door. “She said at least three. Did you not hear her?”
“She threw out a number to satisfy you, to get you to list it with her. Dex said we should get an analysis of what other like properties have sold for in the last thirty days. She should’ve had a list for us.”
“She said there aren’t any like properties. And if your precious Dex knows so much about it, why didn’t he run the numbers? Three words: Realtor, Dot, Com.”
“Because I don’t want to sell.”
“So you’ve said twenty million times.” Kennedy starts the car and screeches out of the parking space.
We’re halfway home when I remember the steaks I wanted to buy.
“We’ll find the money another way,” I say, sorry that I was such a snot at the real estate office. Kennedy’s desperate, I get that. I would be too if I were in her shoes. But we’re talking about a great sum of money here and the no small matter of possibly uprooting people from their homes. The bottom line is selling is not something we should do out of desperation or on the spur of the moment. We should know exactly what we’re getting ourselves into and the true value of the property, not Sheila spitballing a random number.
And then there’s Willy. Yes, he was a shit father and probably a shit human being. And a crook, let’s not forget. But from everything I’ve learned about my late father, he was deliberate. Calculating. And whip smart.
“There’s a reason Willy bought Cedar Pines and there’s a reason he left it to us,” I tell Kennedy, who’s giving me the silent treatment. “As far as I can tell it was his last big purchase before he was carted off to prison. Why? Why a broken-down trailer park in the middle of nowhere?”
“Perhaps if you hadn’t dragged us off the way you did, Sheila could’ve enlightened us on that front.”
“Didn’t you notice that when you asked about Willy, she obfuscated? Willy bought Cedar Pines under a limited liability corporation. My guess is neither she nor Dick Morton from Compass ever met Willy Keil. More than likely they dealt with a representative of Willy’s LLC.”
“How do you know this?”
“I looked it up.” Actually, Michael Cabanatuan, an investigative reporter atSF Voice,did it for me. “It’s public record.”
“You think Willy was trying to hide the purchase?”
“I do. It’s not all that unusual. Movie stars do it all the time for privacy reasons.”
“Willy wasn’t a movie star,” Kennedy says. “He may have been famous in the gambling world, but he was far from a household name. Did he buy other things under the same LLC? For all we know he used this phony corporation to buy everything, even his toilet paper.”
“Okay, even if that’s true . . . why? You yourself said it wasn’t as if he was Jennifer Aniston or Steph Curry, or Jeff Bezos.”
Kennedy hangs a right off the highway into Cedar Pines. “For tax reasons? Maybe he had an outstanding debt and didn’t want anyone to know what his assets were. Or he was just a secretive SOB.”
“All valid possibilities. But we’re back to the original question: Why a trailer park in the middle of nowhere?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
* * *
This isn’t turning out the way I’d hoped. Since Dex got here, he’s done nothing but complain.The Wi-Fi sucks,the bed is lumpy,the steaks are too well done.
When he’s not bitching incessantly, he’s on the phone, drafting players for his fantasy football team with Darnell, a coworker.
This weekend is supposed to be about us spending quality time together.
“You want to take a walk?” It’s getting darker earlier but there’s still enough daylight to take a quick creek-side stroll.
“Yeah, sure.” He stops channel surfing and puts down the remote control. “You have any bug spray?”
“Let me look.” I find an ancient can of Off in the medicine cabinet and wonder if it has an expiration date. “Here you go.”
