“What is it?” I asked.
Valenti took a few seconds for dramatic effect.
“The seminal museum of contemporary American art,” he answered with a smug look of satisfaction, not so much at the accomplishment of having your own museum but at the fact that I was interested in hearing about it. “You know I have the largest collection in the world?”
I told him I didn’t. He took my answer as an invitation to tell me about it in excruciating detail. His tone shifted to feigned boredom as if he was annoyed that he had to explain it to me. He rattled off names — Diebenkorn, Ruscha, Baledessari — two-thirds of whom I had never heard of, and prattled on about this movement and that school and only a graduate art history student could tell you if he knew what he was talking about. Each acquisition followed the same formula — an important piece purchased directly from the influential artist when they were unknown or out of favor or flat broke. He knew exactly what he paid and he knew exactly what it was worth today. His lips glistened as he categorized pieces as “10x” or “100x” or even “1000x,” which referred to the level of price appreciation they had garnered since he purchased them. Not once did he talk about a specific piece in any great detail outside of its monetary value.
Valenti then removed a pen from his jacket pocket and crudely started scribbling on the impeccably rendered drawings. In a few strokes, he added a fourth floor and in big bold letters the words, “VALENTI ART CENTER.”
“Subtle,” I said.
Valenti looked at me askance but then smiled. “It has to be taller,” he told me, “so when all those prigs from Pasadena come into town for the opera, the first thing they see is my name.”
The random building at the far end of Chinatown wasn’t so random anymore. It was a lousy spot to put a seminal museum of contemporary American art but it was the ideal spot to remind everyone how rich you are that you are able to put a seminal museum of contemporary American art wherever the hell you want to.
As a first-generation multi-billionaire, Valenti had the money to elevate him into the stratosphere of the elite but he lacked the currency of credibility among that set. Some years ago he realized fine art was his ticket in and set off on a buying spree unsurpassed by even the city’s preeminent museums.
“Well, like you said,” I smiled and motioned for another beer, “it’s all about the art.”
This time he laughed.
“I am worth ten billion dollars but that means nothing to you. Or, it means a lot but you don’t want to let me know it.”
“The latter,” I told him truthfully.
“That’s why I trust you. That’s why I need you to help me find my granddaughter.” I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly and looked at the surly bartender as if expecting him to repeat it for me. “She has been missing for four days,” Valenti confirmed but offered up no further details. He carefully folded up the drawings.
“Have you called the police?”
He ignored my question.
“One hundred thousand dollars if you can find her,” he said and stood up from the bar stool. “Please give me your answer this evening.”
He left me with the bill.
***
I decided to walk back to the office despite it being the first truly hot day of the summer. In this stretch of the city there seemed to be a natural aversion to trees and the sun broiled the concrete landscape into a seemingly harder surface. I skirted the south side of Hill to hide in the narrow slit of shadow cast by the buildings on my left.
On the walk I replayed in my head the events of the last hour with Valenti. We spent the entire time talking about his artwork and the incredible capital gains he had made off their canvases and only at the very end did he get to the real reason for the meeting. He spoke of his missing granddaughter with none of the passion he reserved for the retelling of his art conquests. She was an afterthought, a loose end that needed to be tied. And I hated him at that moment. Not because of his coldness towards a missing human being but because I didn’t decline his offer on the spot. Because I sat there and listened to his every word, and when he deemed it time to dangle an offer of money, I put out my hat.
The walk back to the office was an emotional contrast. With distance from the bar came the courage to tell Valenti where he could shove his hundred thousand dollar offer. By the time I reached First Street, I had nobly climbed up on my high horse and within a few blocks further I had the perfect zinger to tell him off. The great one-liners always come much later than when you need them.
But with time, the wonderfully pragmatic mind took over. As I began the long ascent up Bunker Hill, an internal pitch session made a very convincing, very one-sided case for taking Valenti up on his offer. Post-divorce, I was cash-strapped and sweltering in a fixer-upper in Eagle Rock with no air conditioning. A hundred thousand dollar cash infusion would solve many of my earthly problems.
Plus, I was bored.
I thought of Bob Gershon and the retirement party and the words he said. We shared a similar view of our roles, and although I was not quite at the point of total despair that he had reached, I was definitely hurtling towards a similar conclusion. I could envision myself in that board room in twenty years giving the same speech. And it scared me.
By the time I got back to the office, most of the people had left, trying to catch the early trains back to Orange County. I passed by Bob’s empty office. You can say this much — the machine certainly was efficient in eradicating cancerous cells from the corporate ecosystem. His office was completely wiped clean of belongings and no trace remained of the man who had given forty-plus years of his life to the company. Except for one thing — the row of crystal trophies, the culmination of a career, that spanned the wall-to-wall shelf above his desk. They were that constant North Star of accomplishment that I gazed at during our weekly touch base meetings. But I couldn’t figure out why they had left the awards when they had clearly shipped back everything else, including the pencils.
I pulled his desk chair over and climbed up to reach for one of the statuettes. It was a heavy obelisk with a granite base. The crystal was a little dusty but I could clearly read the etched words next to my fingers:
“YOUR NAME HERE”
They were samples from various corporate-appreciation gift companies but displayed like the trophies of a grand master. Bob said he only recently came to the conclusion that his life spent here was meaningless. But it was clear he came to that conclusion long before that.
ONE CONDITION
There comes a point in life when people simply stop evolving. They settle on the haircut they will get for the rest of their lives, the wardrobe that will never get updated, the speech that defies the passing eras. The Coverdale Club reached that point forty years ago.
The paneled dining room was empty except for a few dusty old-timers enjoying the most popular appetizer in the house — double rye Manhattans. Audubon and fox hunting prints decorated the walls and harkened a simple, more bucolic life full of nature and slaughter. A tuxedoed waiter, clutching a leather-bound menu, padded across the burgundy carpet but he needn’t have gone through the trouble as I could have guessed the menu’s contents without looking — salad of iceberg lettuce wedges and bleu cheese dressing, London Broil, potato dauphine, and thick asparagus with hollandaise, all washed down with a ruby claret.
“Good afternoon,” the elderly waiter intoned. “May I inquire whose guest you are gracing us as today?”
He apparently was familiar with the entire member roster to know that I didn’t belong to the club, although that feat wasn’t too impressive since I was the only person under sixty in the entire place. He watched me make one last scan of the dining room.
“Are you meeting a member?” asked the voice with a growing sense of annoyance.
“Yes,” I answered. “Carl Valenti.”
The osteoporosis posture suddenly became a little straighter and the voice became a little more helpful. For a name that normally drew my ire,
this time it actually felt good to say it. The man eagerly led me to a small elevator with another vestige of the past, a human operator. The directory called out the gymnasium, a lyceum for guest speakers, and then “residences” at the top which was code for rooms to entertain young women on the make. They also served as actual residences when the young woman gets you kicked out of your mansion in San Marino. We got off at the floor with the gym.
I was led into a room lined with mahogany lockers and covered in hunter green carpet that smelled of laudanum and foot powder. The room was full of big, white bellies in towels and older black men who waited on them. It echoed an unpleasant “yes’um” era when blacks served as the backbone of the service industry in Los Angeles.
I followed the attendant into one of the saunas hidden behind a groaning, wooden door. Valenti was the only occupant. He sat hunched forward on one of the benches. He had old man skin, like an over-stretched sweater, with rivulets of sweat running through the folds. The door thudded shut as the attendant left us alone.
“Do you want to talk outside?” I asked. I was already sweating and clearly not dressed for the occasion.
“It’s quieter in here,” he answered.
“Okay,” I said. “How should we start?”
“You tell me. You’re the investigator.”
The man clearly never missed an opportunity to needle.
“No, I’m not an investigator,” I said, loosening the collar of my shirt. “But maybe that’s where we should start. Tell me why you didn’t hire a real one.”
“I’ve worked with private investigators in the past. They are nothing more than blackmailers in disguise. I can’t invite that sort of temptation into this.”
“What would they be tempted with, Mr. Valenti?”
He didn’t like that question.
“Every family has its unseemly side. Mine is no different. I’d rather not have that be exploited.”
“Tell me about your granddaughter.”
“There’s nothing unseemly about her,” he snapped.
“I didn’t ask for the dirt on her,” I corrected, though now it made me think I should have. “I was just asking for some general information.”
Valenti spent the next five minutes describing his only grandchild. Jeanette was the daughter of Meredith Schwartzman, his only child through a second marriage. The girl lived with her mother who was permanently separated from her husband. He talked about the missing girl like a proud grandfather but he relayed the information with a reporter’s distance. The words matched but the tone didn’t.
I did a stint in recruiting before my current role with the firm. There I developed an invaluable skill called the Bullshit Detector. Over the last two decades, résumés had become so bloated with fluff and jargon that it became nearly impossible to discern what someone actually did in their past roles.
“Facilitated discussions among teams of senior managers…”
“Liaison for strategic external clients…”
“Workflow oversight of core content deliverables…”
Like those red lens glasses that kids use to find the secret word, the Bullshit Detector allowed you to see through the spin and get to the heart of what someone did.
“Scheduled meetings.”
“Answered phones.”
“Did nothing.”
There was so much nonsense coming out of Valenti’s mouth that I had to shut off the detector for fear of it overheating. My head swirled in the maddening array of evasive answers and half-truths. Or it could have been the fact that the room was a hundred and eighty degrees and I was wearing wool. Thankfully the attendant came in and poured another ladle of water on the hot stones.
“Your granddaughter is fourteen years old. Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked.
“There was a time when you could own the police,” he lamented, “but now you have to own the union to own the police and that is too expensive a proposition. They have an insatiable appetite. I don’t want the publicity that comes with an official investigation.”
“It’s your granddaughter,” I said flatly.
Valenti didn’t appreciate the recrimination in that statement.
“I know it means nothing to you but that museum means a lot to me.” It was the first thing he said that I actually believed. “The building won’t go up without a fight. There are a lot of people who would like to see me fail. Do you know about the ballot initiative?”
I remembered reading about a local proposition sponsored by the offspring of one of Chinatown’s scions. It was an innocuous-sounding change to a certain cultural heritage provision which was in reality a thinly-disguised maneuver to block the construction of Valenti’s art museum. It was a bit of a local scandal because one of the sponsors of the proposition was none other than the art foundation that Valenti founded and would use to populate the museum itself. Adding to the controversy was the fact that the person leading the charge was the head of the foundation, Valenti’s own estranged son-in-law.
“The Barnacle thinks he’s so clever,” he laughed. I assumed he was referring to his former kin. “He still hasn’t learned who he is dealing with.”
“Is your granddaughter’s disappearance somehow connected to the museum?” I wanted to bring us back to the issue at hand.
“That’s why I am potentially paying you,” he shot back. “To find out.” I let him calm down a minute by remaining quiet. He busied himself with the coals and readjusted the plank that kept him from burning his ass on the bench. “There’s one other thing. There was a note.”
“What kind of note?” I asked.
“An email asking for money.” He sounded ashamed.
“From your granddaughter?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“It just asked for money.”
“What’d you do?”
“What do you think I did?” he asked back. “I paid it.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” he concluded.
“How do you know it was legitimate?”
“It was legitimate.”
“How can you be sure it wasn’t someone posing as your granddaughter?”
“The email was sent to an account that only Jeanette has the address for. I set it up just for her.”
“I’d like to see the email.”
“I have a copy for you downstairs in the car. There is a full packet there for you to look through.” I was curious why he didn’t bother to bring it up. “My driver will give you full access to my properties to do whatever you need to do.”
“Your driver? I don’t understand.”
“Hector will take you wherever you need to go.”
“I have a car, Mr. Valenti.”
“Hector is a condition of the offer,” he stated firmly.
“I wasn’t aware I needed a chaperone.”
“It’s not up for negotiation.”
***
The front door of the town car was locked and Valenti’s driver made no effort to do anything about it so I settled in upon the creaking leather in the back seat. As we pulled out onto Figueroa, I anxiously looked back towards the Club and wondered what would become of my car sitting in the garage down below.
“I’m Chuck,” I said to the back of the shiny black head.
I got no response.
“You’re Hector, right?”
There was no acknowledgement on his end.
“Don’t worry, I’m not much of a conversationalist either,” I told him and asked that he take me to the girl’s home. At least I knew he was listening to me because we banked three lanes over towards the entrance to the 110.
I wanted to talk to the girl’s family and perhaps look around her house for some insights into why she left. What exactly I was going to look for when I got there was a mystery but it felt like the correct thing to do. Sitting on the seat next to me was the folder Valenti referenced which contained various bits of information, including the email Va
lenti received from his granddaughter:
Need $45,000. Don’t ask why.
Am in trouble. —J
I had already worked an unflattering image of Jeanette in my head, and this email confirmed it. I pictured a wild young girl, coming into her own with more money than most would see in their lifetime, living an entitled life of private schools in Beverly Hills and vacation homes that followed the seasons. The ambiguous way Valenti described her led me to believe she had already amassed a cemetery’s worth of skeletons that he was both ashamed of and frightened of, as they threatened the realization of his museum. I imagined an over-sexed waif landing herself in some dire financial situation that was both inevitable and doomed to be repeated because of the bottomless reserve of funds always there to bail her out. In a very short while I came to resent this little brat. That is, until I came upon her photo.
The over-sexed waif was actually a frumpy, unassuming girl of fourteen who looked painfully uncomfortable in her own skin. It was a simple photograph overlooking the ocean — most likely Hawaii — with a smiling and casually-dressed Valenti with his arm draped around Jeannette’s shoulder. Everything about her was embarrassed, like the camera lens was the glare of a thousand suns whose sole purpose was to illuminate all of her faults. She angled her body in a way to spare it the uncompromising reality of the photograph. She tucked in her chin and offered up a sideways half-smile to hide its imperfections. With one leg bent behind her, she appeared to be nervously grinding her toes into the sand and would have crawled into the indentation in the earth if she could.
The town car merged onto the 405 and headed north a short way, exiting before we hit the pass. We turned off the main drag and started weaving our way up into the residential area of Brentwood. The houses here weren’t audacious but they came at audacious prices. Many were colonial revivals or renovated ranches. We stopped in front of a contemporary structure made of burnished steel, thick panes of glass, and strategically-placed planks of blonde wood. The yard was small and immaculate. Not a single stray leaf blotted the walkway up to the front door.
The Eternal Summer (Chuck Restic Private Investigator Series Book 2) Page 2
