He was a broken man who didn’t want to admit it, someone who salved his wounds by taking on an air of aloofness to show how little the old man’s needling bothered him. He heroically played the part of the soldier in the old movies who tells his buddy he’s fine even though everyone around him knows the gut shot is fatal.
“I’ll tell you a good one,” he chuckled. “When it came time for my fortieth birthday, he gave me a thick envelope, letter-sized. In it was a copy of his will.” He looked to me for some kind of reaction but got none. “It was his way of telling me that I wasn’t in it. What a piece of work, right?” We shared a good laugh. Or, he laughed and I watched him.
“About your daughter,” I reminded him.
Again he waved me off and let the laughter draw out to its unnatural conclusion.
“I’ll call her this evening and tell her to come home,” as if it was as easy as a ten second phone call.
“Mr. Valenti believes this could be something serious—”
“Uh-huh.”
“—enough that he has hired me to find her.”
“Look, I don’t judge you,” he told me magnanimously.
“I appreciate it,” I said, although suddenly the tone was no longer among equals.
“You have a living to earn and I don’t begrudge it. Heck, I’ll even help you get your money. But you don’t know the old man. This isn’t about my daughter.”
“What is it about, then?”
“What it’s always about — getting what he wants.” Schwartzman was starting to look a little off-balanced. “He wants this museum,” he slurred. “He’ll do anything to get it. You can’t put anything past him.”
The whole thing seemed wildly implausible. But then again this was a wildly implausible family. There was a missing teenager, a worried grandfather with potentially ulterior motives for having her found, and two parents who couldn’t be bothered to care.
“Is your daughter close to her grandfather?”
“He’s a very persuasive man,” he answered.
I got more details from Schwartzman about his daughter’s friends than I got from her mother. I asked him to call me as soon as he heard from Jeanette and I promised to do the same if I learned anything new. He walked me out of the office and even felt equals enough to put his arm around me.
“Tell me something,” he said, pausing by the receptionist’s desk. “Did he use my name when you spoke?”
“Who? Mr. Valenti?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t really remember, Mr. Schwartzman.”
“You don’t have to be polite. I know he called me ‘The Barnacle’. It’s okay, I like it,” he reassured. “It’s rather appropriate.”
“Why’s that?” I asked casually.
“Because it’ll take dynamite to get me off this ship,” he said defiantly.
Hector was waiting in the downstairs lobby and opened the door for me as I approached. I paused to let a young Asian man coming in the opposite direction go first. Just as the man crossed the threshold I saw Hector flick the door just enough to close the gap between the door and the jam. The move knocked the man off balance, and he stumbled into the lobby.
“Asshole,” he sneered at an emotionless Hector.
I looked at Hector, still holding the door open for me but decided to exit through the other bank.
***
We stopped at a burger place on Pico not far from Schwartzman’s office. We ordered from separate lines and ate at separate tables. He never looked in my direction, but I watched him.
He consumed his meal with the methodical approach of someone who ate for nourishment, not for pleasure. On the surface, he gave off the image of an old man oblivious to all the things going on around him. A screaming baby to his right got not so much as a glance. A homeless man asking for money received even less attention. He ate his entire meal with a dab of mayonnaise on his moustache, a white dot on a black canvas that I could see from a good twenty feet away. Yet all the while I felt like he was watching everything in great detail.
He saw her before I did.
Morgan McIlroy turned her nose up at the modest establishment. She kept both her arms in tight to her body as if letting them wander would expose them to unknown amounts of germs. I looked past her to the parking lot and saw the Mercedes and two girlfriends waiting for her. They wanted no part of the burger place.
Hector led her over to my table and wordlessly asked her to sit. I was worried that our meeting would put her on edge — so worried that I had Jeff call her parents first to provide the introduction. But my concern was unwarranted because Morgan wasn’t bothered in the least. There was an undeserved confidence in the way she casually sat with an adult stranger. She leaned back in the booth and pulled one leg up so her knee could serve as a place to rest her chin. She was around Jeanette’s age, maybe a little older, but they couldn’t have been more different. She was the over-sexed waif I imagined Valenti’s granddaughter to be.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” I began.
“Sure, but I don’t think I can help,” she replied. She studied the remains of my half-eaten meal with her lip slightly curled. “I mean, we’re not like friends or anything.”
“Well, we’re just trying to find out as much information as we can. How long have you known her?”
“Maybe five years. Our parents are friends,” she added.
Morgan was confirming my suspicions that Jeanette was a lonely kid whose interactions with others came mainly through her family.
“Do you know a boy named Nelson something?”
“Portillo? Yeah, he goes to my school.” Then she added, “They give scholarships to families with challenging economic means.”
It was a talking point straight out of the school’s PR campaign but despite the altruistic core of the words in the sentence there was still an air of snobbery by the person delivering it.
“So Jeanette and Nelson were friends?”
“Yeah, they’re close.”
“Are they dating?” I probed.
“I guess so.”
“Do you know his number?”
Morgan tapped away on her phone and tracked down his cell. I copied the number down.
“What about a home address?” I asked.
“One of my friends is in art class with him,” she explained. “She probably has it,” and before she finished the sentence she was sending a text asking for the address. “Jeanette did text me recently,” she said almost like an afterthought.
“She did? When?”
“I don’t know. About three weeks ago.” Morgan again eyed my fries but this time she started eating them. She scowled at the first bite but that didn’t stop her from motoring through the rest of them. “She asked for money,” said the girl with a mouthful of food.
“Do you still have the text?”
“Yeah,” she answered and began scrolling through her old texts. “It was for some sick amount of money, like thirty thousand dollars or something.” She spent the next five minutes looking for it and handed her phone over to show me.
It was a long text that rambled through a half-apology and then a request for money for something she couldn’t say. The amount requested was the same she asked of Valenti by email. I noted the date and time but my memory told me it was shortly after the same request went to her grandfather. There was an address listed where Morgan was to bring the money. I wrote that down and heard Morgan snicker.
“It’d be easier if I just forwarded the text to you.”
“I’m the old-fashioned kind,” I said. I read through the text a few more times but didn’t glean anything more. “It doesn’t look like you responded.”
“I just ignored it. Too weird.”
“Did you ever talk to her about it?”
“I don’t think I saw her since then,” she answered.
“Was this normal to you? I mean, had she ever asked you for money before?”
“We never really talked much or hun
g out,” she explained.
“Did you ever talk to each other?” I probed.
“Maybe at a Christmas party at my parents’ house,” she said, then added: “She’s just weird.”
“We’re all weird.”
“Not like her. She’s sort of a loner.”
There was sympathy in her words, a sort of sadness that another human being could be so alone. And there was fear that something like that could happen to her. I started to get a better picture of the girl I was looking for and even of the one in front of me. The latter was full of bluster that projected a pronounced maturity but underneath she was very much the opposite. Her phone buzzed and she reflexively picked up the phone. It was her friend replying with Nelson’s address.
“Do you want to write it down?” she smirked.
“Text it to me,” I told her.
Before we parted, I asked that she keep our conversation in confidence but I knew full well that wasn’t going to happen. A flurry of gossip among the kids might actually help flush out some more information and it even might help flush out Jeanette herself.
Morgan was back to her casual, confident self, and I was grateful for it. When I wished her good bye she bounced to her feet and flashed me a peace sign.
“With light and love,” she chirped.
***
The house was a mustard-colored box whose stucco was bleached near white in spots where the sun pounded it relentlessly. The treeless front yard was covered in a layer of brittle crab grass like hay spread out for a pony-ride stable. An overpowering smell of cat urine baking in the sun tickled the area high up in the nose.
The screen door was intact but the screen was not. I reached through it to knock on the windowless door. A few moments passed before an abuelita in a housecoat shuffled in the doorway.
“Hi, we’re looking for Nelson,” I said in a slow and deliberate manner, but the old woman stared blankly back at me. “Nelson Portillo? Is he home?”
I got no response and looked to Hector to provide some assistance. Instead, he reached passed the abuelita and pushed the front door open wider and simultaneously stepped into the house.
“Whoa, what are you doing?” I said.
This woke the abuelita up and she rattled off a string of invectives at Hector but they fell on deaf ears. I saw movement in the dark area towards the back of the house. Hector saw it too and ran in that direction. There was more shouting inside and then a flash of light of a rear door being opened and the bright sun pouring in.
I stepped off the stoop and ran to the side of the house where a narrow walkway cut through the space between Nelson’s house and the neighbor’s. I crossed the small back yard, jumped a rusted chain link fence, and stumbled into the back alley. To the right was a long, empty stretch. To the left was a shorter bit that led to a cross street. I ran in that direction.
Hector stood in the middle of the intersection, his arms hanging by his sides but enough away from his body to be in a pose of provocation. Faced off with him was a young Latino of indeterminate age because of his shaved head and tattoos. The young man reached into the pocket of his calf-length shorts and pulled out a switchblade. He swirled the tip in Hector’s direction. The blade glinted brilliantly in the afternoon sun.
I moved a few paces towards them.
“Let’s get out of here,” I called out to Hector. “It’s not worth it.”
The man facing off with Hector glanced in my direction and then back to his elder combatant.
“Listen to the guero, old man,” he smirked.
Hector didn’t heed his advice. He calmly removed his jacket, folded it once over and laid it on the pavement. When he stood back up, he had a knife of his own. Unlike his foe, Hector held the knife in a fist with the blade pointed down. It felt more menacing.
The closest I had ever been to a knife fight was my high school production of West Side Story when I endured two plus hours of torturous singing because of a crush I had on the girl who played Maria. There was nothing poetic about this version. There were no hunched over torsos, no choreographed circling. The younger man puffed out his chest and rolled up onto the balls of his feet in this odd bouncy posture. He feinted towards Hector’s shoulder but was surprised, as was I, by the lack of a response from the old man. Hector stood motionless. He somehow knew there was no intention to harm behind the move. What was an attempt to frighten succeeded only in scaring the intimidator.
Hector took a purposeful step forward when a Honda held together by Bondo and duct tape came to a rapid stop on the far corner. Two young Latinos emerged, leaving the front and driver’s doors open. They instinctively looped around Hector in a sort of pincer move that would have made Rommel proud. The three of them looked at Hector, and then to me, and then calculated their odds. I could see them collectively come to a satisfying conclusion — three against one, fair fight.
But Hector didn’t act like the underdog. If anything, he was more emboldened by the long odds. He made the first move, and all three men took a synchronized step back. Art sometimes does imitate life. Hector singled out the original fighter and squared off with him. His first step was met with a move that stopped him cold. The man lifted his XXL white t-shirt and revealed a gun tucked into the elastic waistband of his basketball shorts. The butt of the gun was like an ink stain on his stomach.
I took a step back. Hector didn’t move an inch. He stared impassively at the threat. The man with the gun decided Hector wasn’t going to charge him and seemed to relax a bit. He slowly backed up towards the car and his friends moved with him. They all got in and sped off.
“What the hell was that?” I shouted as Hector approached, but he didn’t stop to answer. I reached out and grabbed his arm. The old man shot me a look that instantly eased my grip.
“I told him when we meet again I was going to kill him.”
“Who?”
Hector thumbed in the direction of the aborted knife fight.
“The boy who took Mr. Valenti’s money,” he answered.
THE GREAT SOCKEYE RUN
First thing Monday morning I called my assistant in. She was a three-hundred-pound woman with a hint of an Okie accent that went back two generations. She was full of old-timey phrases that somehow didn’t grate on me, most likely because she had the purest heart of anyone I had ever met. I held onto her for a decade despite many efforts to move her somewhere else. In the corporate world, people covet assistants like they covet neighbor’s wives.
“Yes, Mr. Restic?” she sang. She insisted on using formal titles despite the fact that we told her not to.
“Can you dig up the name of the private investigator we use for background checks on job candidates?”
“Of course,” she replied, but I detected a slight hesitation. For the average associate, we employed a standard online service that combed through arrest records and publicly-available financial data. But for certain senior roles we needed to look deeper into people’s lives. The public record did not always tell the full story; money and a good lawyer can get a lot of stuff expunged from the book of record. And what’s readily available doesn’t uncover what we called “soft issues.” Mistresses were concerning but not as concerning as multiple divorces. The firm didn’t mind people of low morals but it couldn’t expose itself to individuals whose poor judgment would cost them gobs of money. Another big red flag was anyone who initiated a lawsuit. If they did it in the past, who was to say they wouldn’t do it to us?
My assistant knew we weren’t currently searching for a candidate at this level but she was so polite she would never openly question me on it. She returned a moment later with the contact info for Frank “The Badger” Freeley.
It was a self-appointed nickname but I didn’t begrudge him because it was all part of his brand, which he remained very true to. He worked on all of our big assignments and he did marvelous work. Most often he’d uncover details that even the candidates had forgotten. I had never met the man in person. All of my interactions w
ith Badger were over the phone, which only added to his mystery.
“There he is!” shouted the voice on the other end of the line. That was Badger’s catchphrase but it didn’t necessarily mean he knew who the “he” actually was. It was something he said to everyone.
“Badger,” I shouted back, “it’s Chuck Restic.”
“What do you got for me?”
There was little time for pleasantries with this guy.
“I got a unique one,” I told him and then lowered my voice. “But it’s not for the company. It’s for me.”
“Give me the name.”
The seriousness in his voice far exceeded whatever assignment I was about to give him. He brought everything to the level of an attempt on the President’s life. I loved this guy for it even if it was a put-on. I gave him the name of Valenti’s driver.
“Hector Hermosillo.”
Badger took down what details I had on the man. I left out, however, the incident with the knives. Badger taught me that part — you want to discover facts but you don’t want a filtered set of facts to skew the search for more.
I was anxious to see what he could dig up. Hector was an enigma in this affair of the girl’s disappearance. He had an uncommonly intimate relationship with Valenti and the family. He also was not someone you imagined a billionaire would use as his personal driver. The incident with the knife made me think he had other skills to offer.
Hector told me he was the one who delivered the money that Jeanette asked for, but she wasn’t the one who picked it up. The young man with the knife was the only person at the meeting point. It was there that Hector handed over the money but with a warning that if he saw him again he would kill him. I had to give Hector some credit for being true to his word. I believed he might have killed that boy if the gun hadn’t appeared.
The Eternal Summer (Chuck Restic Private Investigator Series Book 2) Page 4
