So he and Arenhold strike a deal. Arenhold “loans” him a huge sum of money, backdated. Emil “defaults” and files Chapter 7. Arenhold then lays claim to the liquidated assets — enabling Emil to plead insolvency to everyone else in line to collect.
I pictured him fretting beneath his Stetson, intoning in that folksy twang of his.
Apologies, muchachos. Well’s gone dry.
In the meantime, Arenhold funnels the money back to Bergstrom. Minus a service fee.
What read like financial ruin was the opposite: a sweetheart lawsuit, ensuring freedom.
With that done, Bergstrom effectively dropped from the public record. He’d learned his lesson about seeking the limelight. Or perhaps that had been the plan all along.
The land acquisition and sales firm has operations in Southern California and intends to open an office in Northern California later this year.
He’d never opened any such office that I could find.
As with the father, so with the son: I found sketchy information about Beau’s early life — his birthday, a defunct Myspace page — but his recent history was blank.
Neither man appeared to own anything of significant value.
Hey Beau,
Thanks so much for your email. It was great getting to know you, too. I’m still sore from our hike.
That property is crazy! You did a great job, it’s exactly what I’m looking for.
I understand you need to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I’m working on getting together everything you asked for, and I hope you can understand that it might take me a while. I have a bunch of work travel coming up and it’s going to occupy a lot of my attention. If you haven’t heard from me in a couple weeks, please follow up.
Looking forward to reconnecting soon.
Clay
Chapter 18
A disgruntled person is a private investigator’s best friend.
A disgruntled spouse is a private investigator’s BFF.
Kathleen Bergstrom had reverted to her maiden name of Jessup. During the eighties and nineties, while Emil was honing his craft, she’d made a go of it in Hollywood. IMDB listed nineteen credits. A few basic cable leading roles. The majority low-grade fare such as Screaming Blonde #2 in Attack of the Face-Eating Pandas and Confused Beach Girl in Kamikaze Shark 3: Blood Fin Soup.
Her last gig was 2007’s Right of First Revenge. Old Woman.
By my math she was then forty-three years old.
Time to hang it up.
I called her, introduced myself, told her what I was after.
She laughed and sighed, in that order. “Come on by, we’ll talk.”
Like her ex-husband, Kathleen had migrated north. Presently she was living her best life at the Rossmoor Retirement Community, a two-thousand-acre independent living development on the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel, where the offbeat urban landscape of Berkeley and Oakland dissolved into open space, tract homes, and big-box stores.
The booth guard examined my driver’s license and raised the barrier arm, and I drove to the Creekside Grill. Kathleen was seated on the patio, lipstick on the rim of her Bloody Mary. Despite the ferocious heat — ninety degrees at ten a.m. — she was impeccably put together: coral twinset, honey hair feathered à la Farrah Fawcett. Discreet makeup emphasized superb bone structure.
She squeezed my fingers and smiled. “What are you drinking?”
“Water’s good.”
She waved to a white-haired waiter. “Water for my friend, please, Jack.”
He brought the carafe. “Will you want another, ma’am?”
“I’m sure I’ll need it,” she said. “Check back in a few.”
He left with a bow.
Golf carts buzzed, sprinklers chuffed, the pock-pock of pickleball rang out.
“Emil Bergstrom,” she said. “Blast from the not-so-good past.”
“Sorry to bring it up.”
“Oh, I’m a big girl.”
“How’d you meet?”
“He picked me up at a party,” she said. “You’ll have to take my word that he was good-looking back then. And I was young and naïve. I’m not ashamed to say so. I’d only been in LA a couple of months. He drove a Porsche, too. That impressed me.”
“What was he up to?”
“He called himself a businessman. He always had twenty-five deals going at once.”
“Do you remember names or details?”
“I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to. It was exciting enough for me to go racing from one party to the next. He knew all these wannabe producer types. Guys who had money to spend, or they needed to look like they did. There was a lot of booze and drugs floating around. And Emil can talk the stripes off a zebra. He’d cook up some cockamamie scheme. Thirty seconds later they’re climbing over each other with their checkbooks out.”
“When did things start to go bad?”
“For us or for him?”
“Either. Both.”
“He couldn’t keep it in his pants. We fight, I cry, he swears up and down it’ll never happen again. You won’t find a single gal in Hollywood who can’t tell the same story.”
“I read that he was arrested for domestic violence.”
She started. “That was an isolated incident. I tried to leave the room and he grabbed my arm. Nothing worse than that.”
“You reported it.”
“Well, I was pregnant at the time. Things were very tense.”
“Were you worried about the baby?”
“No. It was... I was... It was an isolated incident.”
“We don’t have to talk about it,” I said.
She stirred her drink with the celery stalk. “It feels like another woman’s life.”
I nodded.
“It’s not in Emil’s nature to be physical,” she said. “He doesn’t have to be. If he wants something, he gets you to do it.”
“Did you maintain a relationship after the divorce?”
“We saw each other every so often. I wanted him to know his son. Not that Emil cared. He’d send Beau a birthday card with five dollars. Drop in without warning and take him for ice cream. That sort of thing.”
“Child support?”
“Off and on. I never felt he was deliberately making my life hard. More that he forgot about us once we were out of sight.”
“Are you familiar with a man by the name of Rolando Pineda? He’s a lawyer.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“What about William Arenhold?”
“Him, yes.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“Once. We went to San Francisco for a weekend. It was a nice time, we drove up PCH, had dinner by the wharf. When we got to our hotel, there was this man waiting in the lobby. Emil introduced him as Billy. I remember he was a real charmer. He kissed my hand, and Emil sent me up to the room so they could stay at the bar and talk. I was so mad. Here we are, we’ve come all this way, it’s supposed to be a romantic getaway, and this is what you’re doing?”
She drained her drink, flagged Jack for another.
I said, “Any idea what Emil and Arenhold talked about?”
“None. But they were down there for hours. Emil woke me up when he came in, and we had a fight about it. In the morning he apologized. He bought me flowers and we went to tour Alcatraz.”
“Approximately when was this?”
“Beau was born in ’88. So before then.”
And at least five years before the “lawsuit” that had driven Emil out of LA.
I asked Kathleen about that.