Chapter 23: A New Home

Sunday December 28

As they were leaving, Matt invited Jodi’s mother and aunt to visit anytime.

The invitation reminded Matt and he phoned Meredith while Raven drove. After buying homes for both sisters, Matt wanted to own a home for his developing family.

“Unfortunately, the owner isn’t willing to sell,” Meredith replied, so Matt put her to work finding a new home for them, one he could buy. The trip home seemed as if half the population of San Diego was headed for L.A. Either that, or a large portion of the population of Los Angeles had gone to or through San Diego or other nearby tourist spots for Christmas. Now they were headed home, packed on the freeway like a school of sardines slowly swimming north.

They finally dragged in three hours later to find Meredith and Helen waiting with twelve possibilities. Meredith and Helen were at the house often enough that Matt had given them keys. Eight of the available houses were too far away from the school.

The group looked over the four remaining homes. Meredith wanted to exclude one because she felt it was too big. One feature about the home caught Matt’s attention right away and he laughed, pointing at the helipad. The home was within two miles of his sisters and the freeway, and three miles of school. Not that Matt cared, but part of three holes of the Wilmont Country Club golf course were right behind the house.

Wilmont Parkway was the main thoroughfare. Talbot Street ran parallel and was the street the mansion was on. Homes belonging to country club wannabes lined Talbot Street and much of the north side of Wilmont Parkway. The lots were each two to three acres and the homes were large.

The home with the helipad sat on just over ten acres near the east end of Talbot. The house was a mansion. The ad on the internet said the house was 49,000 square feet and had twenty-two bedrooms, each with a private bathroom. Matt knew they needed several bedrooms, but that was ridiculous, especially with a price tag of eighty-two million dollars.

“Next,” he chuckled.

They reviewed the remaining three houses. One was too small with no possibility of expansion. Meredith warned that one was only two blocks from an area of town where you wouldn’t feel safe walking, even during the day. The bad neighborhoods had grown closer each year, which was probably the reason the owner was selling.

The final house would need an addition built to give them more bedrooms. They’d also need to knock out a wall to make the master bedroom larger and needed to extend the four-car garage to provide enough parking.

“Damn,” Meredith said after reading the information about the house. “The house is already built right up to the limit lines. Codes for the area require twenty feet between the property line and any buildings. In addition, buildings can cover no more than half the lot. You’d have to build up, and would have to build a below-ground addition for more parking,” she warned.

They looked at the eight homes Meredith had already eliminated and agreed that they were too far away. That left them looking at building a new house or living along the beach or near Beverly Hills. Matt felt that the best of those options was to build their place. They spent an hour listing what they wanted in a house, watching the list grow to two pages. Carla finally made the decision for them.

“The only viable option is the mansion with the helipad,” she said. “It’s more than we need right now, but who knows what the future holds? How many people have we had staying here at one time or another? What happens when we start having children? I’d love to have that open space for the kids to run around in and play in, especially since a huge wall encloses everything to keep them safe.

“There’s also the added benefit of the helipad. If we get late night helicopters again, we have a place for them to land. When Bill and Roger’s friends drop by in their SUVs, it will be behind that twenty-foot-high rock wall so no nosy neighbors wonder what we’re doing. Matt can even take a helicopter to and from the airport when he goes on book signing tours.

“In a few years, Sue should have a practice, especially if she takes over for Steve. The house has enough space for her to have a nice office setup like Steve has. I’ll bet we could even find an interior room to make into a dungeon if Sue needs something like that for her practice,” she teased.

“It has a half cellar,” Meredith chuckled.

Matt looked around the table at each of his women, starting with Jodi. “Can we afford it?” he asked.

“You could pay cash for two of them without touching your medium or long-term investments,” she replied with a smirk, which surprised Matt. Either CC had been making more donations to his offshore account, or Jodi’s investments had done exceedingly well.

“You can pay cash?” Meredith gasped.

“I didn’t realize that writing was quite so lucrative,” she commented after Jodi nodded.

“The writing pays well, but not that well,” Matt laughed. “You’ve met Roger,” he stated. Meredith and Helen nodded. “My publisher sent Roger to teach me more about the espionage world. Roger did spend several years as a spy, but some foreign government that he hasn’t identified became suspicious of him, severely limiting his value. Instead, he now works for one of our government’s secret law enforcement groups as a troubleshooter.”

Matt went on to explain briefly about how he first got involved in Pebble Beach, and about getting more involved with some of the people he works with, helping the government track down major criminals and terrorists.

“Some of their people are experts at tracking down bank accounts and property. The government confiscates the money and property. The lead agency in each case keeps two-thirds of what they confiscate. They divide the remainder between the people directly involved in the case, based on how much they helped.

“For instance, if I got someone to divulge critical information that helped to bring down the group, I would get a full share of anything confiscated, even though I didn’t go with them to capture anyone and wasn’t involved in any shooting.

“They usually bring us a suitcase filled with cash after everything is accounted for. The girls love counting it. When they give us money, especially cash, they also give us a letter on the lead agency’s letterhead with a code number. When the bank reports the cash transaction because it’s over ten thousand dollars, they give the government that code number. The government lets the bank know it’s okay for us to have that much cash and that they are already aware of it. We send a copy of the letter with our federal and state income taxes. That way, we don’t have to pay taxes on it.

“Maybe I’m in the wrong business,” Meredith teased.

“That’s how I got shot that time. I was trying to run interference for an agent with a prisoner. Someone put a tracking device on their car and they couldn’t shake the tail. When I cut off the pursuing car, they shot at me.”

“Is that what happened in the Caymans, too?” Helen asked.

“Nope, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to help.”

“You won’t get in trouble for telling us about this, will you?” Meredith asked.

“No, I haven’t really told you much. Besides, I learned after they did it that the government did a background check on the two of you because we spend so much time with you.” That news surprised both women. When Bill told Matt, it had surprised him, too.

Meredith called and made an appointment to see the house at 10:00 the next morning. Matt had enough time to answer some of the backlog of email on his author’s site.

He did find one more story from someone still “playing the game” that he decided to incorporate into the new series he had just started. He was calling the series Bishop’s Game after the main character that he named Bishop. The first book was Bishop’s Opening, named after a chess opening and the main character trying to turn a suspected Russian agent. If he’s successful, it will create an opportunity he can exploit to extract secret information from Russia.

For you chess nuts, the Bishop’s Opening is: 1. P-K4, P-K4 2. N-KB3, although you probably know that already.

The second book would be Berlin Defense. The attempt is discovered and the main character tries to maintain his cover while escaping via Berlin. The book is named after one possible response to the Bishop’s opening.

Again, for you chess nuts, the Berlin Defense is: 1. P-K4, P-K4

2. N-KB3, N-QB3.

Several other books in the series would be named after different responses to the Bishop’s opening.

Monday December 29

Meredith and Helen spent the night. Guessing that they’d be looking at properties tomorrow, they had brought clothes with them.

The mansion was about three miles north of the rental house. The rock wall looked formidable and was all they could see. The front gate wasn’t one where you drove straight up to it from the street. The short driveway made a right turn with the security gate about a hundred feet from the street.

The rock wall towered above them along both sides of the driveway, still not allowing a view of the house or the property. A solid metal gate blocked the driveway. If you didn’t have a radio frequency gate opener in your car, the guard at the guard shack had to let you in--if you were authorized. They weren’t authorized unless the other realtor was with them.

Meredith was shaking her head when the other realtor showed up fifteen minutes late. “For a sale this big, he should have been here at least fifteen minutes early,” she groused.

Once he arrived, the gate guard opened the gate and they gaped disbelievingly. The sight greeting them bore only a marginal resemblance to what had appeared in the photos on the website. Aside from the trees, every plant was dead. Even some of the trees looked like they had already succumbed or might not survive.

The once immaculately manicured lawns and landscaping worthy of the country club were now dead. Hiding most of the dead grass was last spring’s crop of weeds, now dead and standing nearly chest high. The dead bushes and hedges stood as a stark reminder of the drought Southern California was experiencing. One lit match could start a major brush fire on the property.

The pool was a disaster. Left untended, even though it had been drained at some point, the bottom was now covered with rotted leaves, sticks, and trash that had blown into it. The bottom of the pool and the lower few inches of the pool walls were stained black from the rotting vegetation collected there. The water from last November and December’s El Niño rainstorms had been deep enough that there were still a couple of inches of murky water in the deep end. Even the other realtor was shaking his head disgustedly.

If anything, inside the house was even worse. Brazen thieves had stolen nearly everything that wasn’t permanently attached. The appliances, and chandeliers were gone. The heavy gym equipment was all that remained, although the loose dumbbells were missing from the racks. It was obvious from the amount and locations of trash in the house that homeless squatters had lived inside the house for quite a while.

“How could someone break into the house and take everything?” Matt asked. “They would need to open the gate and bypass the security system. I can’t imagine the neighbors not calling the police to report anything cheaper than a BMW driving up to the house.”

“The family supplied all the information I have,” the realtor replied. “According to neighbors, the widow who lived here had a staff that maintained the house and the property meticulously. About three years ago, she didn’t come down for breakfast. The upstairs maid found her in bed where she passed away during the night.

“Since then, her four children have fought over the estate. The older son wants the mansion but can’t afford to pay his siblings their share. He sued saying that their mother promised him the house. Unfortunately for him, her will specified that the four children were to split her net worth evenly. None of the kids could afford to pay the upkeep on this place while everything was tied up in court. The older son was the executor for his mother’s estate and let the staff go to save money so it didn’t drain what was in the estate. He even had the utilities shut off to save money. At least he had thought he was saving money.

“When I first got the listing, I discovered that the front gate had been released from inside. Evidently, someone climbed over the wall and hit the manual release. The manual release is in case the power goes out. While the power was off and the batteries in the alarm system had died, none of the alarms worked.

“At some point, squatters moved in. When I got the listing four days ago, I made the executor turn on the utilities and hire armed security guards to get rid of the squatters. The guards let the squatters take their belongings, but, as you can see, they left at least a year’s worth of trash inside.

“The judge ruled last week that they had to sell the mansion and split the proceeds. I just listed the property three days ago.”

“We’ll need to get appraisers out here,” Meredith said. “Who do you use?”

“Depending on who is available, I use Betts, Watkins, Eberhardt, or Wang for big estates,” he replied.

“All good choices,” Meredith agreed. “I’ll call Wang and you can call one of the other three. We’ll see how close their appraisals are. Do the principals know what a mess the place is?” she asked.

“Definitely,” he said, almost angrily. “The executor even tried to blame the mess on me. I told him to check with his attorney to find out how much a defamation of character suit would cost him if he ever said that aloud again. I called his three siblings and warned them about the condition, too. The executor is not a happy camper right now. Given the litigious nature of this group, I expect to see them back in court trying to hold the executor responsible for the damage,” he chuckled.

Despite the atrocious mess in the house, they went through every room. Fortunately, the realtor had brought three flashlights and a spotlight that plugged into the wall. They needed them in some of the interior rooms with no windows. Any lamps or hanging light fixtures had been removed and the lightbulbs had been stolen from recessed light fixtures.

In addition, nearly every window in the house was broken. Matt couldn’t understand what the squatters were thinking, doing so much damage to the building. Then they found the remnants of what looked like a flophouse for druggies, including used needles lying on the floor.

It was mid-afternoon by the time they finished their tour of the house and attached garage. They also toured the eight staff cottages, as well as the workshops and greenhouse. Everyone was surprised that only the house had been vandalized.

The large greenhouse had nearly four hundred plants growing inside. The realtor called the police to come get the pot plants and the opium poppies before the squatters could sneak back in at night to get them.

Despite the destruction and the condition of the grounds, Matt was actually impressed with the house.

“Well?” Meredith asked him.

“I like it, but my fiancée has the last word,” he replied, nodding to Raven.

“Yes!” Raven exclaimed emphatically.

Matt gave the realtor a check for $100,000 as a good faith deposit, subject to the results of the appraisals and an agreement on a reasonable price.

He heard a week later that the squatters had returned for their plants two nights after the visit. The security guards had called the police, who ended up in a shootout with eight men.

It took ten days to reach an agreement on a price. Four days were for the detailed appraisals. Once they were in, the executor kept insisting that the appraisers were wrong because the cleanup would only cost a few thousand dollars. The realtor hired a contractor to give him a quick estimate to repair the house. He called a pool contractor to give him a bid to restore the pool, as well as the outdoor Jacuzzi and the Jacuzzi inside the house. He called a landscaping company to give him a bid to replace the landscaping, including any trees that looked like they were dying, and to prune dead branches from the surviving trees. The realtor gave the landscaper hundreds of pictures of what the landscaping had looked like originally.

The executor was flabbergasted when he learned that the repairs would cost more than ten million dollars. That didn’t even include the crew already removing trash from the house. They filled five large construction dumpsters with nothing but trash left by the squatters.

When the executor caved on the price, Matt put the money into an escrow account with a fourteen-day escrow. The day escrow closed, Meredith and Helen met Matt and the girls at the estate. Mr. Wang, the appraiser she had hired, was also there and had a huge grin on his face as he led them around to the back of the house. He pointed to four exhaust vents on the roof and then took them inside the house, showing that the exhaust vents didn’t originate on the first or second floors of the house.

“I think you’ll enjoy this. Wondering about those exhaust vents drove me crazy and I returned several times trying to figure out where they went. A comment I overheard made me try one last time and it took me the better part of yesterday to find it,” he said as he pointed to a tiny hole in the mortar between the bricks that made up the basement wall. The hole was the size of a pencil lead. Mr. Wang inserted what looked like part of a straightened wire coat hanger and they heard a quiet click. Then he pushed on the wall and a six-foot wide and eight-foot-high door swung open.

“This house was completed in 1917 and remodeled in 1992. Evidently, the original owner liked wine with dinner and a sip of Scotch after dinner and didn’t let Prohibition stop him. In fact, he seems to have either embraced or thumbed his nose at Prohibition, depending on how you look at it,” he chuckled. When he shone his flashlight around the room behind the hidden door, they saw what appeared to be a small nightclub.

In the right half of the room were twenty-five round tables, each with five chairs. The left side of the room had a long wooden bar with twenty bar stools. Behind the bar were dozens of partial bottles of various types of booze. Below the bar where the barkeepers could reach them were wooden boxes of what looked like old beer bottles with no label. On the opposite side of the room from the door was an old upright piano and a stage.

Other bottles had hand-printed labels. There were bottles of Scotch, and all the common spirits from the era. Some of the bottles had labels from commercial distilleries. The wall behind the bar had a door that opened into another room. That room had dozens of wooden boxes containing empty bottles and ten wooden crates of full bottles of Dewar’s Scotch, a brand Matt recognized.

The large sink had evidently been used to wash the glassware that currently filled racks and shelves behind the bar. A damp spot below the sink showed that the water pipe to the sink leaked slightly. Little did Matt know right then how lucky that small leak would prove to be.

“There’s more,” Mr. Wang said, leading them to the right side of the room. “I noticed that this room is eight feet narrower than the room with the speakeasy,” he explained, again sticking the coat hanger wire into a tiny hole in the mortar. After another muted click, he pushed open another hidden door. It led to a set of wide stairs.

“Be careful when you get to the bottom of the stairs. There’s a damp spot where the water from the sink soaked through the limestone floor beneath the sink,” he warned.

The stairs descended twelve feet below the basement. When Mr. Wang shined his flashlight around this room, everyone gasped. The room was filled with sturdy wooden wine racks that looked to be nearly half-full.

“Definitely not a teetotaler,” Matt chuckled. “I take it the woman who lived here didn’t know about this.”

“We’ll have to see if we can find the people who were on her staff and ask them,” Meredith replied.

A month later, the pool and both Jacuzzi’s were clean and repaired. They had been upgraded to meet current statutes and were ready to use. Inside the house, the trash had been removed and the remodel and repair were well underway. Since the squatters had damaged all the plaster walls, they were replaced with drywall.

Before the drywall was installed, Matt had the electrical wiring completely replaced to meet current regulations. He also had them run coaxial cable through the walls. Some would be for their Wi-Fi, but most would be for the security system. He had intercoms installed in every room, and sensors to turn lights off automatically if there was no movement in the room for five minutes.

He even had solar panels installed on the roof of the house and garage, as well as the cottages and workshops. Even after figuring on quadrupling the electricity usage of the last owner, he figured they’d have extra electricity to sell to the power company.

He also had solar water heating for both the house and the pool. Once the repair work on the house was complete enough for them to live in part of it, they planned to have the pool enclosed so they could use it year-round.

With the trash and old plaster walls gone, as well as the damaged doors and broken windows, they invited family and close friends over to see the place. Everyone had heard about it and had seen the “before” pictures but to walk through the monstrous house was an experience. Matt chuckled, wondering when a butler wearing a tuxedo would show up and ask if he was lost or in the wrong house.

The guests were all surprised when he showed them the speakeasy and the wine cellar. They used two of the bottles of Scotch for a toast and Matt told them what he’d since learned about the original owner. Heinrich Dambach had been a wealthy farmer and rancher from near St. Louis. He moved west looking for what he called, “Previously untilled land to farm.”

In 1890, Herr Dambach bought forty thousand acres, a mixture of foothills and relatively flat farmland. Each year for five years, he planted fifteen acres of orange trees on the hillsides, or 1050 new trees each year. He also bought cattle and continued to increase the size of his herd. After purchasing the initial herd, he bought year-old heifers each year to increase the herd faster than natural growth.

The fifth year, after planting another fifteen acres of orange trees, he harvested his first crop from the original fifteen acres. Each year, his harvest grew when another fifteen acres matured enough to produce a crop.

Then, in 1897, the discovery of oil on a property adjacent to his east property line suddenly had several major oil companies trying to buy his land. He knew what oil was worth and refused to sell for what they were offering. Instead, as the big oil companies bought up the rest of the land around him, he hired a wildcatter to drill on his land.

The wildcatter struck oil right in the middle of his property. With the producing well as proof of oil beneath his land, he signed an agreement with Standard Oil, allowing them to drill on his property. Rather than receiving a payment based on barrels produced, he opted for a monthly payment per well. The wildcatter had warned him that oil companies routinely understated how many barrels of oil each well produced when they had to pay someone based on the well’s production. Dambach knew how many barrels the first well produced each day and figured any other wells would produce the same amount. He based the monthly payment for each well on that number of barrels.

He had to move some of his orange trees to accommodate the oil company but continued planting new trees until he had one hundred fifty acres of orange trees. His cattle ranch was just as lucrative.

He spent some of the money from the oil and built the mansion. When he started building the mansion, Orange County could have easily been named Grape County with so many grapes being grown there, especially along the lower Santa Ana River.

Since he enjoyed wine, he had always wanted to have his own winery. He built the sub-basement below the mansion to store casks of wine. Originally, there had been a wide set of doors outside and a manually operated lift from ground level down to the sub-basement.

He planted several different varieties of grapes on the hills, sure that they would do as well as his orange trees. While his small vineyard grew and produced grapes, it didn’t thrive, and the yields were far below what he needed to have a successful winery.

Discouraged by the failure of his latest undertaking, he began to tour France and Italy on alternating summers, buying wine and champagne. He left management of the orange grove and cattle herd to the supervisors who already oversaw each operation. At that point, he closed off and filled in the lift down to the basement. Then he had racks built to hold his wine purchases.

With passage of the 18th Amendment looming, Dambach had the twenty-foot-high granite wall built around the mansion. He also had the upper basement converted into a speakeasy and began importing as much booze as he could. Even after Prohibition became the law of the land, he had an easy time importing booze from Canada. The people he bought it from transferred it offshore to fishing boats that sailed into the harbor at Newport Beach. Since Newport Beach handled so little freight, especially compared to Long Beach, he had an easy time paying off the eyes keeping watch on the harbor.

Mr. Dambach died in the spring of 1928 after a rattlesnake spooked his horse. The horse shied and unceremoniously dumped him, killing him. His closest relative was his son in St. Louis who had never been to California. While he knew of his father’s cattle and orange groves, and especially his oil wells, he had no idea about the speakeasy’s existence.

Aside from a generous allowance for each of his employees, the rest of Mr. Dambach’s estate went to his son. The son had no interest in the cattle, oranges, mansion, or oil beyond what they were worth, and quickly arranged to sell everything. Standard Oil bought the entire property. They kept the orange trees and paid the former supervisor to continue overseeing that endeavor. They sold off the cattle, glad to be rid of the damn animals that shit all over two-thirds of the property, making it so their men had to watch where they were walking.

Two years later, Standard Oil sold the mansion to the grandfather of the recent executor. Aside from the employees who worked on the ranch, the secret of the speakeasy died with Herr Dambach. Since Prohibition was still in effect, none of the former employees dared tell anyone about it, especially after how generous Dambach had been to each of them in his will.

CC took Matt aside well after he finished his narrative about the mansion’s history and asked, “Would it be possible to move the wine and wine racks into the upper part of the cellar?”

“Why?” he asked.

“I could fill the hidden cellar with computers and servers for my web crawlers,” she replied excitedly.

“We could do that, but I’m not sure the local internet companies have enough bandwidth for something like that. Having them add more bandwidth might alert someone to what we’re doing,” he warned.

“Screw the internet providers. I’ll buy and install satellite antennas around the property. They’d look a lot like what you use for satellite television. I could put one on each of the buildings.”

“Why hide everything? We can just tell anyone who’s curious that we plan to start an internet porn site,” Matt laughed. With that, he contracted to add extra electrical and coaxial cable wiring that terminated in a windowless interior room above the wine cellar. He told the contractor that he planned to use the interior room to hold servers for an internet porn site. The contractor laughed and slapped Matt on the back, congratulating him.

Roger’s security friends designed the security system for the house and grounds, even covering all the outbuildings. They had suggested early on that he replace every window with bullet resistant glass and install steel doors and steel security screen doors for every door that opened to the outside. He already had to replace all but three windows, but now they had to replace the window frames, as well.

The security system for the mansion was much more elaborate than the one for the rental house. The primary cameras were difficult to detect and were connected via coaxial cables. A cheap secondary system was installed that connected via Wi-Fi. That system was meant to keep anyone from looking too hard for the hidden cameras and sensors. They’d know immediately if anyone hacked the Wi-Fi feed from the cheap cameras.

Matt had the contractor turn the cottage closest to the house into a security office with the camera feeds running there, as well as inside the house.