I recapped my first uncomfortable meeting when Gao thought I was coming to see him with a peace offer from Valenti. “I don’t know how he got that idea,” I said, watching for Jeff’s reaction. There wasn’t much, but I was still certain he had helped foment the idea in one of their many discussions. “Today’s meeting was a little unexpected. There was a building in Alhambra, an old Victorian with several Chinese occupants.”
“They aren’t all related, you know,” he said.
“I tracked down the corporation on the deed,” I continued, “and that led me out to Arcadia to a development company linked to Mr. Li. We happened to be at the office, I questioned him on it and he flew off the handle.”
“Well, why wouldn’t he? You’re harassing him about some stupid building. No wonder he thinks you are trying to undermine him.”
“It’s not a stupid building, Mr. Schwartzman.”
“Knock the mister crap off.”
“It’s not a stupid building,” I repeated. He already had his next snarky comeback ready and was just waiting for me to finish so he could lob it my way. “Its address is linked to your daughter.”
He got as far as the first word when my comment hit him and its meaning finally registered. That wiped the smirk off his face.
“Jeanette,” he whispered. It was the look of legitimate remorse. “What do you mean by linked?”
I explained what Hector and I discovered inside the Victorian house. Jeff listened to the details with a look of both shock and confusion. When I finished, he asked:
“But what does that have to do with Jeanette?”
“You knew your daughter was pregnant, right?”
“Pregnant?” he said in a way that made you feel the nausea he was experiencing in his stomach. The man grabbed at the thinning hair on the sides of his head and let his hands drag down and tug onto both ears. He muttered something to himself, even using the second person tense to add to the severity of the personal indictment. I couldn’t exactly make it out but it sounded like, “You’re such an asshole.”
Hector and I diverted our eyes. It was difficult to witness a man’s humiliation on something so fundamental as raising a child. I turned to Hector to suggest that we leave him alone with his thoughts.
Then, the room erupted with a woman’s blood-curdling scream. I had never heard something so primal. I instinctively ducked and covered my head with my arms. Hector leapt to his feet and pulled the knife from his pocket. Jeff didn’t move an inch. He sat at the desk and kept his face buried in his hands.
After a moment I realized the source of the scream came from the art installation on the wall. The woman’s face in the video was back to that cold stare but you could see her chest heaving as she recovered from having just wrenched her guts out. She was composing herself for the next scream.
“I can’t figure out how to shut it off,” Jeff mumbled. The broken man was getting closer to the moment when he would accept defeat and all the ignominy that came with it. He had an expression of serene surrender. But my read on Jeff was slightly off as he apparently had one more fight left in him.
“What do you need from me?” he asked, raising his eyes to meet mine. “I have to do something to help bring Jeanette home.”
“If you ask her to do something do you think she will do it?”
“Probably not,” he admitted, “but I can try.”
“That’s all we want,” I told him. “We need your help, Jeff.”
That seemed to warm his spirits some.
“This nonsense has gone on long enough,” he stated, rising from his chair. “It’s time to bring her home.”
I took his offer for a handshake. He was feeling magnanimous enough to even extend the offer to Hector. The old bastard took a moment but eventually accepted it.
I glanced up at the video behind him. I didn’t know how long the intervals were between screams, but just knowing it was coming cast an unnerving pall over the room. I wanted to be long gone before it happened.
Jeff walked us to his office door but no further.
“I have a few calls to make to my daughter,” he announced. It was good to have him back from the edge. He was a noticeably different person. “And who knows,” he added cheerfully. “We get this thing cleared up perhaps the museum deal can still be salvaged. That’s not the priority, obviously,” he amended, “but it could be one outcome of all this craziness.”
Hector and I left him with his calls and his illusions and made our way out of the foundation’s office. We got as far as the elevator before the woman’s scream came barreling down the empty hall after us. It was still going as the doors closed to whisk us downstairs.
A TIGHT WINDOW
The drive over to Beverlywood took three times longer than it should have. By the time we parked in front of Nelson Portilla’s house, the sun had long since vaporized the marine layer and beat down on us with little obstruction.
After the mini-victory with Jeff Schwartzman, I wanted to speak to the kid’s grandmother and solicit her help in bringing her boy home — and Jeanette with him. But Hector, with his dark glasses and knife poking out of his pocket, didn’t put very many people at ease. The last time they met he violated her home and nearly ran her over in the process.
“I need to speak to her alone,” I said, “and convince her it’s in the boy’s best interest to help us.” He shot me a look like he didn’t have any faith in me and my persuasion capabilities. “You have your doubts?”
“We made a deal,” he shrugged.
“Yes, we did.”
“It’s never good to come between an abuelita and her boy,” he warned as I approached the house. That gave me pause as I recalled the abuelita’s other “boy” and his heavily-armed thug friends.
“Well, it’s better than throwing her son in a head-lock,” I shouted back with little to no conviction.
After several knocks, the old woman opened the door and recognized me with a broad smile. She graciously shuffled me inside and as I crossed the threshold I shot Hector a look for doubting me.
I had caught the woman in between novelas. She fumbled with the remote to shut off the television, which took quite a while. I scanned the dusty framed photographs on the console. They were your typical school photos of awkwardly-smiling boys many years before they became the tattooed-hardened men of today. Nelson’s was easy to spot with his sweeping hair and brooding eyes and look of ineffectual contempt for the world. The chattering of the commercials now silenced, the old woman cleared a spot for me to sit on the couch. Ten minutes of declining offers to eat and drink everything she had in the house soon followed. I finally accepted a glass of water and a greasy papusa to get her to stop.
“That was delicious,” I lied and brought the discussion back to the original purpose of the visit. “I am worried about Nelson.”
The mention of the boy’s name brought a sun-spotted hand to her faintly beating heart. Whatever pleasure she got from feeding a stranger in her house was cast aside by a deep sadness that washed over her face. She muttered some words that sounded like a lament and then gently kissed her fingers.
“Let me help you bring him home,” I offered and placed my hand on her knee.
“He no come home,” she moaned.
“It’s okay, I can help.”
“He’s such a good boy. He my baby,” she said softly.
“I understand. And believe me, I want to help.”
She stood and got the photo down from the shelf and handed it to me. She said something in Spanish and I picked up the word “principe” but nothing else. That word had meaning to me. The only other time I heard it was in reference to a less-than-princely figure. I wondered how accurate it was this time. The woman again kissed her fingers and this time pressed them to the boy’s forehead in the photo.
From the back of the house came a high-pitched squeal and the sound of thrashing bodies. Hector emerged from the kitchen door. He carried a chubby, red-faced teenager like he was a little
baby, except this newborn had fists. Hector plopped Nelson onto the couch vacated by his grandmother. The overstuffed sofa bounced the kid like a car in desperate need of new shocks.
“I caught him coming out the back window,” Hector told me. “He could barely fit,” he added.
The old woman rushed over to console her boy. She had a few choice words for Hector who quietly took them like he was the child who had spent a lifetime disappointing her. He let her have her say, which was plenty. Apparently the fact that she lied to me and was just stalling to give her boy time to escape didn’t factor into the list of things to admonish. I followed Hector’s lead and let her get it all out of her system.
“Nelson, we’re trying to help you,” I said during a break in the abuelita’s recriminations. “Can’t you see that?”
“Whatever,” he pouted, the word every teenager resorted to when they had nothing to say.
Hector made a move towards him, but I held out my arm to intercept.
“Can we talk together in the back?” I asked the boy. I needed to get him away from the security blanket to his left and the menacing figure in front of him. I gestured for him to follow me. He reluctantly took my lead and got up from the couch. Once more I had to tell Hector to stay behind. He shot me a look and then glanced at the old woman whose eyes bored in on him.
“I’ll go outside,” he decided. “Lock the windows,” he advised as he went out the front door.
Nelson’s room was smaller than a junior walk-in closet. Twin beds placed in one of the corners created a perfect L-shaped “couch”. I sat first. The bed creaked and sagged so much that I feared I wouldn’t be able to stand up without a struggle. Nelson wasn’t fully committed and remained in the doorway.
The walls were plastered with a collage of music posters, fashion magazine pages, and his own photographs. The black and white photos were of an artistic bent with their Dutch angles and extreme close-ups. There were an inordinate number of reflection shots — through mirrors, glass doors, and off ponds and puddles. I marveled at youth’s unceasing ability to seek depth in shallow pools.
I pointed to one of the few photos with human subjects. It was a close up of Nelson and Jeanette, cheeks pressed together, smiling up at the camera held an arm’s length away.
“You two look happy,” I said.
Nelson didn’t bother to look up. He stared at some random spot on the carpet like he was trying to burn a hole through its already thin threads. A duffel bag packed nearly full of clothes sat on the floor close to the spot where Nelson put all of his intense attention.
“Where were you going with all of that?” I asked. Failing to get him to engage I tried a different tack. “Did you learn how to drive a stick shift yet?” I teased. This kid had some anger in him and if there was any chance of getting him to talk, I was going to have to engage that anger.
“Don’t take this the wrong way but you’re an idiot. Guys like you and me, but definitely guys like you,” I clarified after giving him the once-over, “don’t take on guys like Valenti.”
I was intentionally casual about my delivery to try to convey an inevitableness to what I was about to tell him. “Do you know how much money he has? Whatever money you think he has, multiply it by a thousand, and then you’ll be half-way there.”
“You think I care?”
“You should. That kind of money buys you things, and I don’t mean stuff like a home better than this.” I made a dismissive gesture to the shabby surroundings.
“That’s how we’re different,” he said, mustering up some self-righteousness, “because that kind of thing don’t matter to me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I corrected. “And you’d like to think it doesn’t, but it does. With his kind of dough people can be bought for a price. Me — why else would I be wasting my time here with you? That old pachuco out front, you—”
He scoffed. I gave it a brief pause.
“Jeanette.”
“You don’t know her,” he shot back.
“I don’t have to.”
“She doesn’t even care about money.”
“Rich people always say that.”
“She’s different,” he countered. “You wouldn’t even know it when talking to her that she’s super rich. She’s just a regular girl,” then realizing how inadequate that sounded, he appended, “but also different. Special.”
All along I never thought that Nelson’s involvement with Jeanette’s disappearance had any trace of a malicious nature. His strident defense of his girl made me wonder if all of this was simply over star-crossed young love by two kids from disparate neighborhoods. A for-profit school with a mission for diversity brought them together. A baby eventually came out of it. It seemed so antiquated for contemporary Los Angeles and for what seemed like a fairly progressive family but some prejudices run silent and they run very deep.
“Do they not like you?” I asked, keeping the subject of the potential hatred broad. I wanted him to fill it in.
“Who?”
“Her family.”
“They don’t care enough about her to worry about me,” he said.
I felt a dull pang in my chest and subconsciously rubbed my shirt back and forth as if warming it up would make it go away. It was one of those feelings that sometimes reared up on the commuter bus ride home at dusk or in the audience of one of those unnecessary conferences I always had to attend. It was that disquieting feeling of being alone.
I thought of Jeanette, the shelves of self-help books, her distracted parents, her lying in that clinic surrounded by strangers, and I felt for the first time a real need to find her. I didn’t necessarily need to bring her home, just find her and talk to her. I’d figure out what I would say later.
“All right, I’m in,” I told him.
He looked at me quizzically.
“In on what?” he asked.
“Whatever it is you guys are trying to do. I’ll help by getting the old man off your backs.”
I could see Nelson internally deliberate the offer. He was trying to determine if this was a trick. Over-selling the offer would only increase his suspicion that it was a trap, so I decided to pull back a bit in order to enhance its legitimacy.
“I don’t even want to hear the plan. I assume it’s a horrible one,” I said with disgust. “But I’ll do what I can. Probably won’t be successful but I will try.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Help us.”
“You look like you could use it.”
After some shuffling of feet and more pouting, I got him to agree on a place and time to meet later that night. I tried to get him to bring us to Jeanette but he wouldn’t go for it.
“I have to talk to her first,” he explained. “You guys show up with me…she wouldn’t forgive me if I did that.”
I didn’t have much choice but to trust him.
“Okay,” I agreed and proffered my hand and shook the dead fish he offered back. “Come on, kid, first thing you have to do is tighten up that shake.”
I left a smiling Nelson to finish packing and walked back to the car where Hector waited by the driver’s door. He looked past me as if expecting to see Nelson in tow.
“We’re going to meet him tonight at a Rally’s out in the Valley,” I explained. Off his quizzical look, “He’s going to bring Jeanette with him.”
Hector said nothing but he didn’t have to. I could hear the doubt in his silence.
“He’ll bring her,” I said.
***
He didn’t bring her. He didn’t even bring himself.
We wasted four hours driving out to Sunland and sitting in a Rally’s parking lot waiting for Nelson and Jeanette to show. But they never did. Just as we were about to call it a night, Hector’s phone buzzed.
“Is it her?” I asked.
“No,” he said and studied the number. “It’s Valenti.”
We both sensed what was about to happen next. I observed Hector answer and casual
ly look away to some random spot across the parking lot as he listened to the old man. It was a short conversation.
“He wants to meet us at the club,” he said.
Hector said nothing on the drive. Perhaps it was my imagination, but he started to resemble the Hector I knew when we first started out on this work. He was morphing back into his old role before my eyes. Or, I was projecting my feelings onto him because I knew at the end of this drive I was going to be fired.
I knew the termination walk very well. I had walked it too many times with associates not to recognize that feeling of a distinct distance growing around me. The banter, if there was any, was small talk of a different sort than the kind engaged around the coffee machine or in the elevator. There, you talked of the weather and last night’s game to non-sports fans. Here, you made hollow observations on anything at all just so you wouldn’t have to listen to the silence.
“Be nice once they open up another lane on the 110 interchange,” I said, but Hector never acknowledged me.
I desperately wanted to crawl into the back seat for the remainder of the ride.
DEAD MAN WALKING
We pulled into the loop under the Coverdale Building and parked under the canopied entrance, a completely unnecessary design as the building above already shielded us from the rain and sun. Rows of exposed light bulbs lit up the space like a Broadway theater.
Inside, I was led to the antiquated dining room and pointed to a table in the corner where Valenti sat. The tuxedoed fellow who was helping me eyed my coatless frame and quietly brought over the house’s blue blazer with shiny, gold buttons. I slipped it on and made the long walk across the burgundy carpet. I slowed as I reached the table and took the coat off. I was growing tired of being told what to do.
Valenti started to dress me down before I even sat down. I held out my hand to stop him.
“No more speeches,” I said. “Not today.”
I looked around for the waiter. Valenti wasn’t going to offer me anything and I was damn determined to get a free cocktail out of the deal before being dismissed. I tried to think of one of the expensive, aged scotches but none of the names immediately came to mind so I ordered a gin instead. A double.
The Eternal Summer (Chuck Restic Private Investigator Series Book 2) Page 11
