Wild Instinct

33

Hal Teller wears a chocolate brown suit tailored in the loose British mode, a white spread-collar shirt, and a shimmering lavender necktie.

Gale considers Teller’s short gray hair brushed back from a dome of a forehead, his light blue eyes, a face lined and tanned from ocean fishing, some of those hours documented by colorful mounts on his office walls.

They’re on the seventh floor of the Tarlow Company in Newport Center, windows south and west for views of the Pacific Ocean, which glimmers silver in the morning light.

Gale has his notebook on a crossed knee, Daniela Mendez a cup of coffee.

“So yes,” says Teller, “Tarlow Company brought me on as an engineer when I was young. I mentored Tarlows II and III on the building arts as well as which projects to take and which to leave. Twenty years later I was the showrunner: residential, commercial, industrial. Now, at eighty, I’m captaining the ship with Bennet II. When I heard about Benny, I sat down in this chair and cried. Four hours later I was still here.”

A respectful silence from Gale and Mendez.

“I understand you were opposed to Wildcoast from the start,” says Gale.

“Opposed? No. But I was aware of the long-term financial realities and said so.”

“You were pulling for warehouses, weren’t you?” asks Mendez. “An enormous fulfillment center not far from Caspers Wilderness Park.”

“Still am. The county, the state, the country needs it. More goods on more doorsteps. Warehousing and distribution from a perfect location — proximity to the big ports for the trucks, and a freeway system that ties the whole nation together. And, because we own the land, we own the warehouses. Benny hated that idea. But, to be honest, I never hated Wildcoast. I just see a better use of our time and capital.”

“Where was Bennet’s father on all this?”

“Torn, I’d say. But you should ask him yourselves.”

“Is the Tarlow Company done with Wildcoast?” asks Gale.

Hal Teller’s blue gaze goes from Gale to Mendez, then he sits back.

“Far from. With Bennet’s sudden death, we’re taking a strategic pause, to consider. In the last few months we’ve seen rising antagonism toward Wildcoast. From the cities of San Juan Capistrano and Laguna Beach. The governor. The Juaneño Indians. The Orange County Board of Supervisors, with the exception of Kevin Elder’s Seventh District, which is bullish on a dream utopia adjacent to county land. Which was ceded by Tarlow Company to the county in 1953 for a wilderness park. In return for Newport Coast development rights.”

“Quite a trade for the Tarlow Company,” says Gale.

Teller nods.

“Especially considering that you bought that land out from under the Acjacheme natives for pennies on the dollar.”

“Pennies on the millions of dollars,” says Teller. “I realize, Mr. Gale, you are a member of that nation. The land grab was shameful, but legal. And let’s not forget that the Spanish taught farming and ranching and building skills to the heathens. Brought them muskets for hunting. And Spanish soldiers for husbands. Sent them away better than they found them is one way to look at it.”

“And trimmed the Natives down from three thousand, nine hundred to eight hundred and sixty-one,” says Gale.

“Shameful. Again. Yes.”

Teller purses his lips and looks down at his immense, curving, glass-top desk.

Trying for penance, thinks Gale.

Penance 101.

“Do you have a suspect in Benny’s murder?” Teller asks.

“We had a suspect that our DA declined to charge. Vernon Jeffs.”

“What was Benny doing way out there in Caspers?”

“We believe he was in the company of Jeffs,” says Mendez.

“Doing what?”

“Possibly to photograph a giant owl not even found in Southern California. We don’t know,” says Gale.

“Do you know him, Jeffs?” asks Mendez.

“Kind of. Benny introduced us at the Bear Cave biker joint one evening. A dive, and I only went because Benny asked me. This was a couple of weeks ago. Jeffs was tending bar. As you know, he’s big, loud, and crude. Benny liked larger-than-life characters. Enjoyed their antics, their stories I guess. Benny told me they hit it off over birds. Benny was an insane birder, if you didn’t know. A great photographer, too. Of birds, all over the world.”

“Hard to think of Jeffs as a birder,” says Mendez. “Doesn’t fit with a motorcycle outlaw.”

“Not at all,” says Teller. “They were talking about some rare owl that Jeffs saw out at Caspers when he was with his wife. Said it’s enormous, and way out of range. Hunts by night, which is when Jeffs allegedly saw it. Benny wanted to photograph it. You know all about his bird travels and photography, I’m sure.”

A beat.

“It might have been all bullshit from Jeffs,” says Teller. “That seemed to be what he’s made of. He tried to tell me the secret to catching ocean fish is Jack in the Box hot sauce, directly applied to the fly or lure. Can’t be Taco Bell or McDonald’s. Says he guided in Louisiana, but I doubt that. Can’t picture a guy that big in a flats boat.”

Gale remembers this hot sauce theory from his days just back from Sangin, when he would relive his fishing memories on YouTube from his bed at the Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton, wondering if he would fish again, wondering if he wanted to remain alive.

“It looks like you’ve fished all over the world,” says Mendez.

Teller surveys his radiant mounts, points to a large fish jumping through acrylic spray. The fish is iridescent yellow with green and blue splatters as if thrown on with a paintbrush. “That’s a dorado down in Baja,” he says. “East Cape. Costa Rica, Brazil, Christmas Island, Fiji, Mauritius, Australia, South Africa, all over.”

“How come you don’t have any pictures of yourself with a fish?” asks Mendez.

“The fish are prettier than me.”

“A modest man.”

“I’m rarely accused of that.”

Gale remembers a dorado he caught in Baja. The thing is, they shimmered brilliantly when alive, their colors flashing and traveling up and down their bodies, but if you killed one for the grill that night it went dull and one-dimensional in seconds.

Light is life, he thinks.

He wrestles his mind back from the Naval Hospital, certainly among the darkest hours of his life.

Light is life.

“Mr. Teller,” he says, “I was out at the Wildcoast site just a few days ago, and there’s quite a bit of excavating and drilling going on. If Wildcoast is under a strategic pause, as you say, why?”

“We’ve already paid our subs for the first phase,” says Teller. “The new people are just finishing it out. And if we decide to go ahead with Wildcoast, we’ll need the perc tests after all.”

“Are you looking for something besides groundwater?” asks Gale.

“Such as?”

“Gold?” asks Mendez.

A humored smile. “Not much in those mountains.”

“Crystals?” asks Gale.

“Quartz, for sure, which is essentially worthless. Tourmaline, maybe. There’s probably rhyolite in there. No, we’ll be happy when we hit fifty feet and either hit the aquifer or not. See what we’re up against.”

A pause.

Gale again remembers Geronima Mills’s words about the Acjacheme creation myth — “...an ocean with rooms of gigantic crystals beneath the earth... a resting place for spirits on their way to the afterlife.”

Wonders what if Hal Teller has heard of it.

Wonders if Hal Teller wants to find a resting place on his way to the afterlife.

“Why did you replace PacWest with Empire Excavators?” asks Mendez.

“Proprietary,” says Teller. “But things in this world always come to dollars and cents.”

“Does the future of the Tarlow Company change, with the death of Bennet?” asks Gale. “Big picture?”

“Certainly.”

“For better or worse?” asks Mendez, leaning forward to set her coffee mug on Teller’s crystal-clear desktop.

“No one knows,” he says. “Different. TC is one of the great Western developers, and for the last twenty years it’s been Benny’s company. His vision. Who can see the future? I can’t.”

“What makes you a good businessman?” asks Mendez.

A shrug and a somber assessment of her.

“I’ll tell you a story,” says Teller. “After a few years of working for the Tarlows, I realized that their company was not created to make homes. It was created to make money. When I graduated from high school, my father told me that’s what all businesses were for. I thought it was cynical and crass until old Tarlow told me the same thing. The founder, that is — Bennet Evans Tarlow. He used the exact same words. Bennet III and I had been arguing that idea for decades.”

A beat then, as Teller gazes down at his clear glass desktop. “I miss Benny.”