Something is shifting in the Los Angeles smog. The old grifters are getting pushed out. A new syndicate is moving in.

(With apologies to Raymond Chandler)

The Santa Ana winds were blowing hot and mean over the mountains. It was the kind of weather that sends city council members and rats scurrying for deeper shadows.

I’m a private dick — name’s Marlowe — and I was in my Hollywood Boulevard office, nursing a lukewarm bourbon out of a glass that had seen better days. Just like the city outside my window, Los Angeles. But something was shifting in the smog. The old grifters were getting pushed out. A new syndicate was moving in.

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I wish I could tell you this caper launched with a blonde walking through my door with a tear in her eye and a dead husband in her trunk.

No. It started with basketball.

A mid-level fixer with a big Venmo balance hired me to look into noise buzzing around the Lakers. Mark Walter, the Guggenheim money man who thought he owned the world because he owned the Dodgers and our precious purple-and-gold, was sweating. Somebody was making a play for the team, and they weren’t using a bank loan. It was this Kushner kid, capo of the White House family syndicate, and he was rolling into town with bags of cash from Nueva York, Silicon V, maybe Arabia. Neither the green nor his partner Mouse Man provided any real........

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