My wife and I drank champagne on the night of January 16, 1994. Things were rosy. Our condo, ideally located in Bel Air, had appreciated nicely, and we had an eager buyer. We stood to double our investment.
Then the Northridge earthquake struck before dawn.
When the phone lines finally came back later that day, the buyer called, giggling, and lowered his original $350,000 offer to $100—provided we would kindly carry a second mortgage for $90,000. We learned the golden rule of California real estate: location does not mean squat if you are perched on a fault line.
A few days later, with the city half shut down, my wife and I were both laid off from our jobs. There was no justice.
We decided to tough it out and rebuild. Our condo was condemned for human habitation while reconstruction was underway, so we took refuge with friends. Over the next few weeks, those friends began to suspect that their liquor cabinet was being raided whenever they took their dog for a walk. After the ninth incident, they installed a hidden security camera. It showed my wife and me removing booze from their cabinet in anticipation of future burglaries. Denied our constitutional right to explain, we were driven from their home and into the streets.
We could not afford both our mortgage and a place to rent. We drove around Los Angeles sleeping in our car. Our credit cards were maxed out. We could not shop. We were about as close to clinically depressed as anyone in California could get. My wife and I entered an experimental medical program at UCLA so we could obtain free Prozac. Soon we felt better. We still did not have jobs, but we no longer cared. Another California tradeoff.
A year later we returned to our condo, which was more or less rebuilt—less being the operative word. During that year we had been visited by the Red Cross, structural engineers, city planners, contractors, exterminators, lawyers, assorted vandals, squatters, the power company, building inspectors, the phone company, renegade IRS agents, FEMA, and four drunken painters.
We inhabited a Twilight Zone of screaming tradesmen who nailed and glued and sawed and pried our place back into shape after the insurance money arrived. Finally, we had only one item left to complete: the installation of a kitchen countertop.
My wife and I agreed on granite gray. The problem was that I was willing to settle for the color alone, while my wife got it into her tiny mind that the gray itself should be derived from actual granite.
Our contractor, John Hathaway, and my wife had already determined that the kitchen was the focal point of the condo. To that end, they had squandered every cent we had saved or could borrow to complete this joyful cooking room. A scant $200 remained in our budget for the countertop—enough to purchase several sheets of plywood. I felt we could paint the plywood a respectable slate gray and simulate that “granite look.”
My wife, exhibiting her usual animal cunning, then broke her ankle and went to stay with her parents.
From the safety of their home, she informed me that unless I came up with a bona fide granite counter, she would not be returning to our nest. I told her this was unfair. She told me that for fifteen years I had promised that someday we would have a granite kitchen. The someday, she said, was now.
I informed Mrs. Hatchet that this was all new to me and that, besides, I would not be dictated to in my own home by her or anyone else. Period.
The next day John and I drove to the San Fernando Valley in search of granite. Our kitchen counter was L-shaped. We found an adequate—but not superior—granite slab for $12,000. Installation was extra. Since this exceeded our budget by roughly $11,800, I realized my original instincts had been correct: we should purchase sturdy plywood and apply a reliable gray waterproof paint. True, wood would not last as long as granite, but what person in his right mind installs kitchen components designed to endure for centuries? Not even the pyramids had granite kitchens, and the pharaohs built those monuments to last forever.
I phoned my wife and shared this observation.
She hinted that if I did not provide a granite counter, our next conversation might be from her girlfriend’s office. Her girlfriend—a Marcia Clark wannabe—was a Southern California divorce attorney. Lovely gal. Fangs.
Life had no justice for me.
I told John that I had put my foot down again. I was going to finish the kitchen my way. He suggested that before I destroyed my marriage, we stop at an out-of-the-way tile store.
The gods smiled on us.
In the warehouse we found several huge pallets of granite tile. The color looked superb and the price was reasonable: $7.50 a square foot. For less than a thousand dollars we could buy enough granite tile for the job. I figured I could probably Crazy Glue the tiles together and create one giant slab. John said Crazy Glue was not the answer. The answer was to find a master tile setter who could fashion the granite to look like a single slab.
Even though we were now way over budget, the granite counter still seemed considerably cheaper than a divorce attorney. I found a Visa card tucked in my wallet and called the bank’s toll-free number. An operator with a nasal whine informed me she would allow me to charge $800, as if it were her money. No matter. Eight hundred dollars was enough to purchase a hundred small granite tiles and, as John said, get the ball rolling.
As I concluded my purchase, I became aware of the odor of rotten onions and rancid garlic. I turned to see a swarthy, smiling man who had materialized out of nowhere and was now standing so close to me that, had he moved another inch, we would have been sharing the same shoes.
“May I inquire,” he said, “what you paid for that most beautiful granite?”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name is Daniel, and I am a craftsman in fine granite and marble.”
“We paid $7.50 a square foot,” said John, who seemed intrigued.
“I can obtain for you exactly the same granite at $3.25 a square foot,” said Daniel. He grinned energetically, exposing a massive gap where his eyeteeth had rotted away.
“You steal it?” I asked.
His grin vanished. He sucked air through his teeth and said, with measured politeness, “Mister, I do not tell you how to do your business. Do not tell me how to do mine. Now tell these people to take back the tile, and come with me. Save yourself some money and grief.”
The clerk scowled at Daniel. Daniel picked his nose, sniffed, and led John to the rear of the store to talk business—tradesman to contractor. I completed the paperwork on the granite and, ten minutes later, with the help of a strong young man, loaded a hundred granite tiles into the back of my car.
John slid into the seat beside me and said, “Daniel is going to show us a job he’s working on. It’s on the way back to your place.”
“He smells like a thief,” I said.
“I’ll watch him. Most of these tradespeople operate fast and loose. Daniel knows a lot about granite, and he can get us a crew right away.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My wife will kill me if anything goes wrong.”
“Look,” said John, “if we work this right, we can get a twenty-thousand-dollar job for a couple of grand.”
“When I got up this morning,” I said, “I had $200 to spend on the counters. Now I’ve spent $750.”
“And if you part with a few more hundred, you’ve got a kitchen worth forty grand.”
Something deep in my gut said: call the police and check out Daniel. There’s probably a reward on his head. Collect it and there’ll be enough money to pay for pros to finish the countertop and floor in granite.
Instead, I found myself following Daniel’s rusted-out, pollution-generating Ford pickup through heavy traffic.
After twenty minutes we arrived at a snazzy Bel Air residence. Daniel got out, pressed a button on the intercom at the gated estate, and we stopped in time to hear the following exchange:
“Yes?” said a muffled voice.
“Is Roger there?”
“He’s no longer with us. Who are you?”
“Daniel, the stone mason.”
“Go away,” said the voice, and the intercom clicked off.
Daniel sauntered back to my car. “They are having a party, and the owner is away. Otherwise we would have been invited in. They loved what I did in their shower.”
He ran his tongue across his filthy teeth, squinted at his cracked watch crystal, and said, “Since I am close to your place, why don’t I take a look at your kitchen?”
“How do you know we are close to my place?” I asked.
“I saw your address on the bill,” he said. “Come on. I will lead the way.”
He got back in his pickup and drove off toward my condo.
John and I followed.
“I think he’s a dangerous citizen,” I said. “And now he knows where I live.”
“Nah,” said John. “I can handle him. He knows a lot about laying granite. Besides, I don’t think he’s a citizen.”
“That makes him all the more dangerous,” I said.
Half an hour later we watched Daniel measure our kitchen. He had no tape measure. He simply eyeballed the room with one bloodshot eye. He wrote figures on the back of a cigarette package and jotted notes in what appeared to be Arabic. Then he announced that his artisans could install granite on the counter, floor, and walls for $1,500. That included all materials. Apparently the job required a great deal of concrete so the floor could be “floated smooth,” which would help the finished granite look like a solid sheet.
“That sounds a little steep,” said John. “We’ll still need about a hundred more square feet of granite.”
“You will need 142 square feet,” Daniel replied. “The price is included in the job.”
While Daniel smoked a Camel on the patio, John and I considered the offer.
“It sounds too good to be true,” I said. “He’s throwing in almost a thousand dollars of tile.”
“With concrete and underlay, his cost is going to be closer to twelve hundred,” said John. “What would it cost me to hire people to install the granite? At least four thousand. If it were solid slabs, twenty-five thousand. Let’s give him a shot. I think he can make your counters look like they’re cut from one piece.”
I watched Daniel sucking on the Camel, blue smoke obscuring his sun-baked face. I got the feeling he was inventorying the contents of our condo. The quake had already smashed most of what we owned, but several rugs had survived. I wondered how long it would be before Daniel was selling them at a swap meet.
“I’m not convinced this guy knows what he’s doing,” I told John.
Daniel came back inside, flashed his smarmy grin, and said, “I will return Monday morning with a crew and supplies. Please give me $500 now.”
I looked at John. John said, “We can’t very well do that. I don’t know what kind of work you do.”
“Ah, references,” said Daniel. “No problem.”
He took out a ragged three-by-five card, found a pair of cracked reading glasses, slipped them on, and read off a phone number.
“Call it,” he said. “These people have a kitchen in which I worked magic. They would give me their firstborn. They think I am a god with granite. That is what they call me—the God of Granite.”
I dialed the number and handed the phone to John.
“This is John Hathaway,” he said. “I’m a general contractor. Do you know Daniel? Good. Is he honest—”
Daniel leaped forward, yanked the phone from John’s ear, and hung it up.
“Don’t ask such personal questions,” said the world’s greatest stone mason. “It’s rude.”
“How are we going to find out if we can trust you?” I asked.
“Give me a check for five hundred dollars, and I will be back here Monday morning with a crew and supplies.”
“I think you’d better go,” I said.
“Please. My five hundred dollars first.”
“Out. The game is over.”
“Game? This is no game. This is my life. Is it that you don’t trust me?”
I said nothing. I simply held the door open.
Daniel reached into his pocket, produced a crumpled check, scribbled in some number, and stuffed it into my pocket.
“As a show of good faith,” he said, “I have written you a check for five hundred dollars. You will please be kind enough to write me a check for the same. This will be a show of good faith on your part.”
I took his check from my pocket and stuffed it back into his shirt.
“Great idea, but it won’t work. Now take your check and leave before I call the police.”
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“I understand you’re a hustler, and I don’t want you in here.”
“If you are going to be that way,” he said, “I will go. I certainly do not wish to remain where I am not wanted.”
I closed the door behind him.
“You were a little hard on him,” said one of John’s helpers. “He is not from this country. He is not used to our ways. I think he knows a lot about stonework.”
“He knows a lot about conning people,” I said. “Tomorrow I’m leaving for Canada, and I don’t want this guy back here.”
“He won’t come. You’ve hurt his feelings.”
“You couldn’t hurt a guy like that if you hit him over the head with a sledgehammer. He’ll be back, and I don’t want him in here.”
“He knows a lot about granite,” said John.
“I’d rather we didn’t hire him,” I said.
I was not going to tell John what to do in front of his workers.
“I don’t know where else we’re going to get that price,” said John. “You may have to settle for plywood.”
“Then we will,” I said.
“But your wife is expecting granite.”
I sighed and gave in an inch. “I don’t care how you get the job done, but if Daniel comes back here—which I do not want—watch him like a hawk.”
The next day I left for Canada and, for the following week, tried to forget about Los Angeles, smog, contractors, and our dream kitchen.
The following Friday, with my wife planning to return to our condo, I called there.
To my surprise, she did not answer. One of John’s workers did. He said there had been some problems and we would not be able to move in for another week. He said my wife had stopped by and had been fairly understanding, then returned to her parents’ place.
Before I could ask him what “fairly understanding” meant, I heard the sound of glass breaking and rocks smashing in the background.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
He explained that Daniel and his people were busy completing the granite counters in the kitchen.
“Who’s supervising him?” I asked.
“We try to, but he never stays put. He’s running around like a madman.”
“Someone was supposed to watch him like a hawk. He’s a thief and a con man.”
The worker admitted that some tools had been stolen. My voice rose, along with my blood pressure, and then the line went dead. I tried calling back. No answer. The phone was dead.
My worst nightmare had been realized.
Late that night I finally reached my wife at her parents’ home and asked her what she thought of the condo. She started to cry.
“Honey, it’s okay,” I said. “I know the counters are a bit short of perfection, but we can redo them any way you want. That guy doing them is a bad person.”
“Oh, you tease,” she said. “We have the most beautiful kitchen counters and floor I have ever seen. You hired someone who is a Michelangelo with stone.”
She raved on and on about how perfect everything had turned out.
When we said goodnight and hung up, I decided she was taking far too much Prozac. Obviously Daniel’s machinations had tipped her into a state of medical denial. I booked a return flight to Los Angeles for the next day.
When I reached the condo, John was locking up.
“Back early,” he said.
“How could you hire that swine?” I demanded, pushing past him toward the kitchen. “Where is that little man? I’m going to rip him apart.”
I rounded the corner and stopped.
It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen in my life.
The kitchen looked as if it had been carved from a single block of granite. The floor and countertop shimmered like gray ice. I was speechless.
John caught up to me. “Great, huh?” he said.
“It’s magnificent. Not only do we have the best kitchen in the complex, my wife hasn’t been overdosing on Prozac.”
I threw my arms around my contractor and hugged him like a long-lost sheepdog. Maybe there was some justice in the world after all. Maybe I had been wrong.
Later, with the condo still unfinished, my wife and I agreed she would remain with her parents while I stayed there and tried to expedite completion. Everywhere, cardboard boxes were stacked to the ceiling—items that had survived the quake, including some broken things we still could not bear to throw away. Someday, when life returned to normal, we would repair the shattered glasses and split vases and crushed computers.
The only completed room in the condo was the kitchen.
I made myself a cup of hot chocolate and sat on the granite counter, admiring it. I could see why my wife was so thrilled. Everything was perfect except for one thing: the edges of the granite counter were jagged. John explained that the edges still needed to be “bull-nosed”—rounded. Granite was so hard that special diamond grinders were required. He assured me it would only take a few hours.
Someone knocked on the front door.
I opened it.
Three frightened men stood there. The tallest finally spoke in a thick Spanish accent.
“Señor, we do not wish to bother you, but we have no money.”
“I’m a little low myself,” I said.
“Did you not like what we did here to your kitchen? My compadres and I did all the stonework.”
“I love what you did. My wife will be eternally grateful.”
“Our wives and children in Mexico are starving. Could you give us a few dollars to send to them?”
“Don’t you work for Daniel?”
“Yes, señor. But he has not paid us a penny. He said you were very unhappy about our work.”
“Not me. He hasn’t paid you?”
“No, señor. And I have a baby that is sick near Oaxaca.”
The man could not have been more than seventeen. He brushed away a tear.
“How much did Daniel say he was going to pay you?”
“He promised each of us one hundred dollars when your kitchen was completed.”
“Can you finish the bull-nosing on my counter?” I asked.
“Yes, but Daniel has the tools. We need the big grinders.”
“And how much would you charge me to complete it if I supplied the grinders?”
“We agreed to do everything for one hundred dollars each. We will finish it, and then you will pay us. Is that fair?”
“Yes,” I said. “It is fair. I’ll give you fifty dollars each now, and when you’ve completed everything I’ll give you another hundred each.”
They smiled. They would eat that night.
I soon learned they had no car and had walked five miles from the Valley. I invited them in, and while they raided the refrigerator, I went into the bedroom and cracked open a large piggy bank filled with quarters from the last six years. I lugged the coins back to the kitchen.
We ate huevos rancheros on the new granite countertop, and I found some cold beer, which they appreciated.
“That is a funny way to pay us,” said the young father.
“I’m a little short of cash,” I said.
“I understand. But how can you afford a beautiful place like this?”
“Before the earthquake my wife and I both worked. Then I lost my job, and now my wife has broken her ankle, so we’re both out of work. We’ve been living on insurance money, but that’s gone.”
“What are you going to do, señor?”
“Beats me.”
“I hope you can teach Daniel about justice so he stops exploiting us,” said the Mexican.
Justice. The word went into my heart like an arrow.
“I’ll see what I can do. Pass the salsa. You think you can finish this place nicely?”
“Yes. We require just three more tiles.”
Of course.
The next morning I went back to the tile company in the Valley and discovered that not a single slab of matching gray granite remained.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “Last week there were tons of it here.”
“I know,” said the manager, a sad-faced woman who looked as though she had worked too many hours for too many years, “but we had a break-in. Someone stole that particular tile.”
A vision of Daniel slinking through the warehouse in the dead of night flashed through my mind.
For the next week I left message after message on Daniel’s pager, but he did not return a single call. Desperate, I called the tile company and asked if they could air-freight matching granite from Italy. They could not. The quarry had produced only enough for two shipments. One had come to California. The other had apparently wound up somewhere in a civil war in Afghanistan.
I called the police and told the story to a sergeant.
He asked me what I wanted.
“Justice,” I said.
He laughed and hung up.
A few days later, alone in my kitchen and staring at the goddamn granite, I left yet another message for Daniel.
“Hi,” I said in my cheeriest voice. “I’ve got to tell you, this is one of the best-looking countertops and floors in the world. I love it. I’d like to pay you the balance we owe you. Drop by and pick it up, or call me with an address and I’ll mail it.”
I had no intention of paying the smarmy little bastard. If I ever got my fingers around his throat, I intended to find out where he was hiding the missing granite.
Then the mail arrived with a phone bill.
Daniel had run up over a hundred dollars in toll charges to people all over Southern California while using my phone.
The next few days I left more messages. Finally, through a private investigator friend, I got a phone number for Daniel. He was living south of Pasadena.
When I called, a man answered.
“Hi, is this Daniel?”
“Yes. How can I help you?”
I began gently. “You did a great job on our kitchen granite, and—”
And that was as far as I got, because he said:
“I am glad you like your kitchen, but I had nothing to do with it.”
What followed was one of the strangest phone conversations of my life.
It turned out there were two Daniels. The man on the phone—Daniel the Good, as I came to think of him—claimed another Daniel had stolen his name, wrecked his finances, emptied his bank accounts, seduced his wife, and ruined his life. This other Daniel—Daniel the Bad, the granite bandit—was also apparently in the process of changing his name again.
I did not entirely believe Daniel the Good. But he gave me a trove of useful information: names, addresses, lawsuits, creditors, ex-wives, girlfriends, lawyers.
Justice, I felt, was edging closer.
Then, in one of those coincidences that make you believe in divine intervention, the tile company called. A customer had returned several hundred pieces of the exact gray granite after deciding not to build a studio.
I set a land-speed record getting there.
I bought two dozen pieces, rented the grinders, picked up my three Mexican stoneworkers, and by noon our condo was filled with Spanish songs and dust as thick as a Canadian blizzard. By the following day they had completed the bull-nosing, and it looked terrific.
Fortunately, a final insurance check arrived, allowing me to pay my helpers. It was reimbursement for my grandmother’s Hummel figurines. I would miss them, but they were a fair trade for our new kitchen.
At lunch that day one of the workers, Carlos, confided that Daniel the Bad was dating his sister, Maria.
“She is beautiful,” he said, “but a little crazy. He will destroy her.”
He asked me to save her.
I told him justice would prevail.
That night, sitting in my kitchen, drinking hot chocolate and admiring the granite, I called Maria.
I did not exactly lie to her. I merely rearranged certain truths.
I suggested that Daniel might still be entangled with his ex-wife, Heather. I hinted at bankruptcy, lawsuits, and tax evasions. I mentioned addresses. I mentioned names. I let the information bloom in her mind like toxic algae.
Then I hung up.
A short while later Daniel called, furious.
He wanted to know how I had gotten Maria’s number. He wanted to know why I was interfering in his personal life. He insisted he was the man who had done my granite work.
I told him I would be happy to clear everything up for Maria—if he came over so I could verify that he really was the Daniel in question.
He said he’d be right over.
As soon as he hung up, I called a friend at the Bel Air Patrol and said a crazed workman was on his way to my condo. A large security guard with a .44 Magnum was immediately dispatched.
Fifteen minutes later Daniel arrived and began pounding on my door.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“It is Daniel, the stone man!”
“Yes,” I said, “but which one?”
I stalled until the security man arrived. Then I stepped outside and, with great innocence, denied that I had ever seen Daniel before. I suggested that perhaps he was the same man who had threatened the woman next door—the owner of the Mail Boxes Etc. where Daniel had once caused trouble.
The guard marched him over there.
The woman took one look at Daniel, pointed a finger, and announced that he had threatened her and was not welcome in her store.
That was enough for the security guard.
He hauled Daniel outside by the collar and lectured him while drumming a huge finger into his chest. Daniel tried to protest, but the guard was enjoying himself too much.
I returned to my condo and called Maria one last time.
I told her Daniel was, at that very moment, being detained for threatening a woman. I gave her the number of Mail Boxes Etc. I gave her the names of people suing him. I gave her the number of Daniel the Good. I gave her the number of Daniel the Bad’s lawyer.
Then I sat in my magnificent kitchen, drank hot chocolate, and waited.
Later that night the phone rang.
It was Daniel.
He was hysterical. He pleaded with me to explain to his fiancée—now apparently his former fiancée—that he was the victim of a monstrous practical joke. He said his enemies were destroying his life. Perhaps, he suggested, the devil himself was involved.
I listened patiently.
Then I heard Maria scream in the background:
“Leave immediately!”
There followed horrible crashing sounds—metal pots striking walls, or flesh, or both. Daniel begged Maria not to hit him with a frying pan.
An instant later I heard what sounded like a hard object thud into Daniel’s head.
The line went dead.
Justice at last.
I finished my hot chocolate and stared at my reflection in the granite counter.