The Silent Second

by Adam Walker Phillips

  “Huh?” he mumbled.

  I repeated the question, enunciating each syllable because it sounded like how cops spoke. Everyone in the group stared at me. They weren’t quite sure what to make of the stranger interrupting the mini-sermon. The minister was particularly perplexed.

  “Why you want to know?” he shot back.

  I stared him down.

  “I was working,” he said without further prompting.

  I nodded like I was processing the information.

  “You a cop?” someone asked.

  I didn’t answer but I didn’t have to. I looked the group over like I was giving them a warning. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a uniformed officer approaching and took the opportunity to leave the group hanging, questions unanswered.

  “Officer,” I called out. “I’m here to see Detective—”

  He blew by me without even a look in my direction. The group around me processed what just happened, then burst out laughing. They created such a ruckus that the officer had to come back and quiet them down.

  “Keep it down,” he warned, “or I am going to send you all home.”

  It took more than ten minutes of explaining, interruptions from the group, a few calls to other officers, and just plain standing around before I finally convinced him that I was asked to be there and not part of the rabble behind the tape.

  “All right, let’s go,” he said, sounding annoyed. It was a cop’s job to always be annoyed.

  I shot my new friends an “I told you so” look as the officer held up the yellow tape so I could pass under it. With his arm raised, I noticed he wore a watch that looked remarkably similar to the one I’d seen on Langford when I had first met him.

  Detective Ricohr sat on stairs that led up to the second floor of Langford’s building. He was in his mid-fifties and had few distinguishing features. He watched over the proceedings like a bored foreman on an assembly line.

  “Larry,” he called out to one of the technicians as I approached, “run a GSR test.”

  A thin Asian man came up with a tackle box and asked me to hold out both of my hands.

  “Just a test to see if you’ve been firing any guns lately,” Detective Ricohr answered before I could ask the question.

  “Is this legal?” I asked.

  “Do you refuse?”

  “Can I refuse?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Um, sure.”

  “Smart move,” he said and waved away the technician. He patted the spot next to him on the stairs. “Sit down here. I have plantar fasciitis and it hurts for me to stand too long.”

  “Did you really think I shot this man?”

  “We found your card in the deceased’s coat. Rather than trek out to wherever the hell you live, it’s easier for you to come to us.”

  “Glad I could help. It’s not like I had anything better to do on a Saturday night,” I complained, even though I really didn’t have anything better to do.

  “You’ll get over it. How well did you know the deceased?”

  “Not well. I’ve only talked to him a couple of times.”

  “When was the last time you two spoke?”

  “Earlier this evening,” I said, though the encounter in the parking lot seemed a long time ago.

  “And where was this?”

  “At the Elysian. We attended a charity event.”

  “About what time was that?”

  “Sevenish.”

  The uniformed officer from earlier came over with a plastic evidence bag that looked like it contained a wallet.

  “We found this in the dumpster down at the end of the alley,” he said, “No money in it.”

  “Poor guy,” Detective Ricohr lamented. “All for a few bucks. Who carries cash anymore?” he asked to no one, even though he waited for an answer. “How much do you have on you?”

  “Is this another trick?” I asked.

  “Not you,” he said. “I was talking to the officer.”

  “Sir?” the patrolman muttered.

  “Maximum, I carry fifty bucks at a time. Plus an emergency fiver in a fold in my wallet in case I get robbed or I blow all my dough on scotch. My mother taught me that trick because the kids used to take my lunch money before I could even get to school. I’d put a quarter in my pocket and two quarters hidden in my shoe. They took the quarter but never knew about the other ones. Stupid kids—lunch was thirty-five cents but they never made the connection. They saw me eat lunch every day but never figured I had to have more money on me to pay for it,” he laughed. “Anyway, leave me that watch before you head back to the station.”

  The officer stared at him, unsure how to respond.

  “Don’t embarrass yourself further, son,” Detective Ricohr said in a very understanding voice and held out his hand. The officer quietly slipped off the watch and handed it to his superior. Detective Ricohr held it out like he was an admonishing a sixth grader.

  “Smarten up, young man,” he said and deposited the watch not in an evidence bag but in his own pocket. The young officer stalked off. “Good detectives have to be good criminals. That kid is too much of a dope to be a good crook. Though he almost sent us looking down the wrong path. Did you notice the deceased’s wallet? It’s one of them breast pocket types. A guy isn’t going to go through all the trouble of rolling over a dead body to get at it and not spend an extra five seconds to get the watch right there in front of him. Especially when watches are so easy to hawk.”

  “So you don’t think it was a robbery.”

  “I don’t know what I think. Tell me about this Deakins Building,” he said casually. I shot him a look. “They’re still looking for the file but so far there’s nothing there. Maybe you could fill me in?”

  I told Detective Ricohr about my initial meeting with Langford and the encounter we had at the charity event. He half listened and wrote nothing down. I shared what little information I had on Ed’s disappearance as well.

  “The Armenians are connected?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Langford seemed pretty nervous when I spoke to him earlier tonight. We were going to talk later but—”

  “He winds up dead,” he finished for me. “Interesting…sort of.”

  “Do you want the Vadaresian family’s contact info? They might have the original documentation on the building transaction.”

  “You’ve been a great help, Mr. Restic,” he said, dismissing me. “Thank you for coming out.”

  Detective Ricohr didn’t seem all that interested in what I had to say, but then again, he didn’t seem like the type to reveal too much of what he was thinking. He reminded me of my first boss at the company. He was the only person I ever met who used the word “nonplussed” correctly. That’s because he was the antithesis of the word. Tell him the building was on fire and he’d casually say, “Well, I guess at some point we should make our way downstairs.” Nothing bothered him. It was an approach I worked hard to mimic but could never quite replicate. During his retirement party, I pulled him aside and asked him how he could remain so calm through all the corporate chaos he’d encountered over his long career. He answered in the same breezy way he always did: “It’s pretty simple,” he told me. “I just didn’t care.”

  The local news vans had descended on the scene and were doing live reports at the entrance to the alley. The scrawny character with the drug-hit theory was pontificating in front of the camera. Even they got bored with him and cut him off mid-sentence.

  As I slipped under the yellow police tape I noticed a familiar face approaching. Detective Alvarado, looking casual in jeans, flashed her shield to the uniformed officer and ducked under the tape. I watched her make her way down the alley and take the seat on the stairs I had just vacated.

  Perhaps Detective Ricohr cared more than I gave him credit for.

  LOVE WHAT YOU DO

  One of the most devastating—and reprehensible—acts against members of Corporate America was committed by the self-help guru who convi
nced workers that in order to be happy they needed to find a job they loved. In a single stroke, he doomed millions of mid-level cogs to an eternal search for something that didn’t exist.

  The numbers simply didn’t support the guru’s panacea. Every company has a core set of roles that is central to what it does as a business. These jobs are the main circuit that gives a company life, and the people in those roles feed off the energy of “feeling a part” of something. But for every role on that circuit, there are twenty more in areas that have nothing directly to do with the company’s business—senior account liaisons, meeting and planning specialists, content development coordinators—roles that have a function but little value and ultimately are wholly unsatisfying. The guru makes his fortune from this group as they gobble up iteration after iteration of the same false promise.

  The true believers quit their stable, well-paying jobs to open up hand-crafted candle businesses out of their garages. The rest play an endless game of switching careers in the hope of finding that elusive one for which every paycheck brings a big dose of happiness. That search is so common that anytime an associate shows up at work wearing a suit, you naturally assume an interview is scheduled. When the person leaves at midday for a “doctor’s appointment,” it is common to wish him or her good luck.

  The week after my very brief stint as a private detective, I found myself roaming the halls a bit more at work. My daily duties had lost some luster from their already fairly lusterless base. On one of my rounds, I noticed someone emerge from one of my legacies at the company—the Resting Room. Expecting a woman in her second trimester, I instead saw a young man carrying a portfolio. He saw me and sheepishly slunk back to his cubicle. Everyone knows to fear HR. The poor guy hadn’t remembered to tuck his résumé back into its folder. So he was using the room for a phone interview, highlighting the challenge of legions of cubicle dwellers—how to actively job search when your supervisor can hear everything you say and see everything on your screen. It comforted me that the Resting Room provided such a valuable service—unintended, sure, but still valuable.

  Then I remembered Ed and his admission when I confronted him about his cologne. He thought I was reprimanding him for using the phone in the Resting Room. This piqued my curiosity. Working backward on the dates, it appeared that Ed disappeared on the day I had spoken to him. And perhaps those calls he made would provide some clues about what happened to him. After all, if they were “I’ll pick up bread on the way home” calls, he would have placed them from his cubicle. But to search out privacy, like our young interviewee had, spoke to something larger.

  I pulled the phone records on the days leading up to Ed’s disappearance. It took a little maneuvering to get this information because of privacy concerns, but I used the young interviewer I discovered misusing the room as an excuse to dig deeper into other potential issues. The list of phone calls was surprisingly long. I settled in at my desk with a big cup of coffee and started making my way through the list.

  The calls could be broken down into two main groups: the Job Seekers and the Personal Crises. The first group was your typical set of corporate recruiters, resume builders, life coaches, and HR folks at other firms. The Personal Crises group laid out neatly on a seriousness scale starting with the minor (Quit Smoking Hotline), elevating to the grave (Planned Parenthood clinics), edging into the critical (Free STD Testing), and culminating with the dire (a phone-sex line with lactating women). I imagined the heightened sense of pleasure this particularly disturbed individual must have gotten from placing the call from a room dedicated to mothers.

  Once I eliminated those two groups, it was easy to isolate which calls Ed had placed. The day before he went missing, there was a call made to Emerald Properties, undoubtedly to Langford, who was working on the deal for the Deakins Building. Within minutes of making that call, two more were made in succession. There was a lapse of about five minutes and then a final call. After that there was a three-hour interval before the next call was placed. I assumed that the first two calls and possibly the third were all made by Ed.

  The first number led to a surprising location—the Glendale Police Department. It was the number to the main switchboard, so there was no way to tell with whom he spoke at the station. The call lasted only a minute and so it was likely he never made it out of the automated recordings. It made me wonder if Ed knew he was in some sort of danger and sought help from the police.

  I dialed the next number on the list, and a heavy, accented voice mumbled something incomprehensible when he answered. There was a lot of indistinguishable noise in the background. It sounded more like a business than residence.

  “Hello?” I said hoping he would repeat what he said when he answered the phone.

  “Yeah,” he said instead.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Huh?”

  “With whom am I speaking?” I said full of formality.

  “What happen?” a confused voice replied.

  “What’s your address?”

  “Oh,” he answered, and his voice brightened at his finally being able to understand what I was saying. He rattled off an address to somewhere in south Glendale on San Fernando Boulevard.

  The third and final number led to a voice recording for Signature Homes. According to the pitch, they offered an oasis of comfort living in an urban landscape. I finally got a live voice on the line and immediately wanted to return to the recording.

  “How might I make your dreams of home ownership come true?” she offered. When confronted with these types of personalities, my instinct is to turn sour.

  “I live in Lincoln Heights with my mother,” I blurted out.

  “We have a number of options to fit any lifestyle,” she replied so quickly that I wondered if she’d even listened to what I had said. “So are you and your mother looking together?” Apparently, she had.

  “I have bad credit.”

  “You’ll be surprised at the range of loan-servicing options available to you.”

  “I’m recently unemployed,” I tried again.

  “We can always work something out where your mother would be the primary borrower,” she said. “Why don’t we set up a time to walk through some wonderful opportunities?”

  A stint at the Guantanamo detention center couldn’t break through her relentless cheerfulness. I made an appointment with a phony name and Claire’s cell phone number and hung up. I took stock of my one lead, the address in Glendale, conjured up a doctor’s appointment, and headed out.

  My co-manager Paul caught me in the elevator lobby with my laptop bag. As I stepped onto the elevator, he wished me luck.

  San Fernando Boulevard winds like an asphalt river through the industrial areas of Glendale, with its unmarked warehouses and occasional low-end strip joint. The address led me to a dingy tire-repair shop where every surface looked like it had been smeared in charcoal. As I approached, the proprietor glanced at the tires on my car as a barber would eye the hair on your neck.

  “How much to fix a slow leak?” I asked.

  He gave me the once-over, twice, then quoted a price that was at least five times the normal one. And people claim discrimination only targets minorities. My tolerance for the “white-guy price” was at its limit.

  “Great!” I said and pointed out the culprit. As he worked on the tire, I probed him for information. “A friend of mine recommended this place—Bedros Vadaresian.” I watched for a reaction and got none. “Do you know Ed?”

  He leaned on a steel rod and walked like a mule around the hand-cranked wheel mount, pausing briefly to dip his hand in a pool of gray water, which he rubbed on the tire to check for leaks.

  “There’s no leak here,” he said accusingly.

  “Oh really? I’ve been having to fill it up—”

  The office door opened and five Armenian men poured out. None of them worked there, as evidenced by their spotless clothing. One of the men stopped to get a better look at me.

  “I know you,�
� he said. Of course he knew me. He was the man I’d seen with Ed’s son on the front porch to his home. “What are you doing here?”

  Before I could continue with my story, the mule with the steel rod rattled off something in Armenian. The only words I picked out were Ed’s name. The other men grew interested and formed a half circle behind me.

  “Fellas,” I said, which sounded like an invitation for a beating. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “What you want with Ed?” the mule asked me, yanking the steel rod out of the wheel mount. It clattered and scraped on the concrete.

  “Nothing.” I started out well but my composure soon devolved into blabbering. “The family asked…you know…I’m just…with the tire here…and a slow leak.…”

  I bolted. I ducked between two of the thugs behind me and ran. I ran out of the tire shop, turned north on San Fernando, and never looked back. I had to stop three blocks later because my lungs felt like they were being shredded with razor blades. The pain from running was nothing compared to the shame at having chosen to run in the first place. Twenty years as an HR executive had earned me a black belt in passive aggression, but it had also completely erased any capability in the old-fashioned, violent kind.

  I sulked along for a few blocks and tried to blot out the last fifteen minutes. I would have gone home and dropped the whole matter except for a small detail—my car was still back at the garage. I decided to check in with Detective Alvarado, leaving out, of course, the part about running away. She was at the precinct so I took a bus up to the station.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You don’t look so good.”

  I told her about the discoveries I made from the Resting Room phone records and my run-in at the tire shop.

  “They assaulted you?” she said and sprung to her feet, ready to confront the assailants.

  “Well, I wouldn’t choose that word,” I said, trying to temper her a bit.

  “Which word would you choose? Did they threaten you?”

  “Verbally?”

  “I can’t think of any other way, unless they wrote it out on an index card.”