“I told you everything.”
“When are they supposed to pay it?” I asked.
“Tomorrow night. We’re gonna get the instructions tomorrow in the morning on where to bring the money.” Hector paused a moment. “I’ll be delivering it.”
“Is the family bringing in the police?”
“No,” he answered but it didn’t sound like he agreed with that decision. From my limited time with Hector, I never got the sense that he was a card-carrying member of the Police Benevolence Society. He was a man who preferred to settle his own disputes in a manner of his choosing. The fact that he had some misgivings about leaving the police out hinted further that he was concerned about something.
“Are you worried what might happen to you tomorrow?”
Hector shifted in his seat into an even more upright position.
“I can handle myself,” he said coolly.
“Then what is it?”
“I think she’s dead.”
The words hit me hard. It was one of those conclusions you ruled out because internally you weren’t prepared for it.
“Why do you think that?” I wanted Hector to defend his opinion so I could shoot it down.
“I saw the email,” he admitted and stared at the floor. “They printed a copy and left it on the desk. I shouldn’t have read it.”
“What did it say?” I asked.
“It said that if Mr. Valenti didn’t pay the money that he would never see the baby alive.”
“That’s it?” He nodded, but I didn’t understand how that sentence meant Jeanette was dead. “I would never bring my baby into it,” he explained before I could ask. “A parent doesn’t do that.”
And there I was again, not understanding the realities of being a parent.
“She’s dead,” he stated. As if even his convinced mind wasn’t quite ready to abandon even a trace of hope, he added, “I think.”
“What does the family say?”
“Mr. Valenti is afraid like me.”
“Why do you say that?”
Again there was a hesitation. After decades of subservience, it didn’t come easy to talk so openly about his boss.
“After his daughter left,” he began, “I saw him in his study. He was crying. I never seen him cry, not for anything. It didn’t look like him. He saw me and I thought he’d yell at me or worse, but he just stared and cried. He told me he couldn’t lose them.”
“Do you know who the father of Jeanette’s baby is?” Hector shook his head. “Your boss was very close to his granddaughter, wasn’t he?” It came out crasser than I intended, not that any degree of tact would have mattered because once the allegation registered with Hector, he leapt to his feet and his right hand flicked for his pocket. “Take it easy,” I said. He stared at me with distant eyes. For the first time in our relationship, I was actually afraid of the man. “Hector, listen to me. You didn’t come here because you thought I was out to get the old man. You want to help him and you think I can help you do it. And I’m trying. I want to bring Jeanette home as much as you do and almost as much as Valenti.”
Hector hadn’t moved and it was unclear if any of the things I said had any effect on moving his hand away from the nifty little number in his pocket. I wanted to get him talking.
“If I’m going to help you, I am going to need some answers. You and Valenti have a pretty tight bond — I can see that by the way you defend him. I need to know why.”
The forever-young man with young-man-like reflexes and a younger man’s temperament seemed to dissolve in an instant. I could now see the greys beneath the shoe-polish black. I felt the aches in his lower back. I saw the tired eyes of someone who had seen too much over too many decades.
“I should have died,” he said, but the death he was referring to was not the one I assumed it was.
Hector recounted the events leading up to the night in 1963 when Gao’s uncle lay dead on the street in the Alpine District. To my surprise he came right out and admitted to killing the man. “I stabbed him in the stomach and he didn’t fight any more,” he stated. Hector looked straight at me when he said it. I searched for signs of remorse and found none. But it wasn’t like he was proud of the deed, either. There was a strange detachment from the retelling of the death, a matter-of-factness that escaped my own sensibilities.
The actual events were mundane to the point of being a cliché. Hector was working for the construction company that Valenti owned. It was his first real attempt at a stable earning life. The job was a small development where a corner of a block was being converted into row houses. Hector explained that there were troubles immediately with the job. Their work was periodically vandalized, their supplies constantly delayed, their tools stolen. “That was the worst part,” Hector explained, “because we had to bring our own tools and without your tools you couldn’t work. It cost a lot of money to replace them. It was money out of our pockets.”
Everyone was certain that the younger Li was behind it. It wasn’t much of a secret, as his cronies taunted the workers whenever they could. They often hung around the job site, and sometimes Li himself joined them. There were a few skirmishes between the two groups but nothing very serious came out of it, that is, until the night of the murder.
Hector was out with friends in some of the dives around Bunker Hill. This was long before the hill became the glittering home of my corporate headquarters. At that time the Victorian neighborhood was a shell of its former self with seedy establishments haunted by lost souls left over from another era. The birth, death, and rebirth of communities are a never-ending story in Los Angeles.
The couple of pops with friends turned into an all-night bender as they crawled from jukebox to jukebox and cruised the tunnels under the hill in a borrowed convertible. At some point in the night, Hector crossed the line of no return and decided to power through with a few more drinks and then get himself sobered up before his morning shift started. Home was too far away in East L.A. and no one was of any mind to drive him out that way. They continued on until the group lost its steam, and Hector had his friends drop him off at the construction site where he found a pile of wrapping from roofing tiles and used that as a makeshift bed to sleep off the bender.
He was awoken by sounds of shattering glass. It was near sunrise and Hector had to orient himself, and his woozy head, to the commotion coming from no more than fifteen feet away. He saw Li smashing a set of newly-installed windows with a roofer’s hammer. Hector confronted him and the two faced off.
“I guess I could have took off,” he reflected and then summed up why he hadn’t. “We’re all just stupid, I guess.”
Hector pulled his knife, Li took a swipe at him with the hammer, and then it was over. All along I waited for Valenti’s entrance into the narrative. And now that we were at a point where a man lay dead, I was both confused and a bit dubious of the whole thing.
“I don’t understand. How did Valenti save your life?”
“He showed up to the job site an hour later and found me. I was crying — crying like a little baby. This guy was dead and my life was over. He asked me what happened, and I told him.”
“Then what?”
“He left, told me to stay where I was and not do anything. He came back twenty minutes later with the boy’s father.”
I made him repeat that last part. I had heard it clearly enough but it didn’t sink in. He confirmed that Valenti brought the elder Li to the construction site and showed him the poor boy’s body and explained what happened. Hector apologized to the man, but the old developer didn’t say anything to him. He and Valenti eventually walked away to talk in private. Valenti returned alone and gave Hector instructions.
“We were supposed to call the police and say that Li had threatened Valenti with a hammer and that I came in to protect him and that’s how the boy died.”
“Why didn’t you just tell the police the truth? It wasn’t murder the way it happened.” His look was enough of a reply to make me
sorry I asked. In those days there wasn’t a lot of faith in the police or the courts to listen to reason, especially when minorities were involved. He was right in assuming his chances were slim to none.
“Either way I was supposed to die that day. Either get killed or get sent to jail,” which in his world was just a different kind of dying. “And he saved my life. I owe him.”
THE CORNFIELDS
I was five minutes late for the rendezvous with Hector because Pat Faber had dropped by my office to see if I was getting nervous about the upcoming interview. That wasn’t how he phrased it, but I could tell that was his intention. I told him that I looked forward to the competition and that I was going to “rise to the challenge,” but the hope for a quick chat was not in the cards. Pat reflected on the many defining points in his career where he similarly rose to the challenge — and won. After several minutes of my telling him how invaluable his perspective was, I finally extricated myself from the tedious discussion so that I could go meet Hector.
His sedan was parked in one of the three slots out front of the Phoenix Bakery in Chinatown. I had to park on the street. The sweetened air around the bakery was so pervasive that each breath felt like another layer of sticky film was added to my throat. It made me thirsty, but it could have just been that I was nervous.
Hector got out when he saw me and he was not pleased with my tardiness. I knew enough to skip an apology and just get down to business.
“Badger here?” I asked.
“Right here,” came the reply as Badger stepped out of the shadowy area by the restaurant next door. He wore his amber sunglasses despite the moonless night and this desolate part of the city being one of the darkest in the area. I could barely see anything beyond an arm’s reach, but he maneuvered easily and proffered a conciliatory hand to Hector.
Earlier that day, Valenti was instructed to deliver the money to a spot in the middle of the Cornfields, a long park that used to be a railway yard just south of Chinatown. Hector was the natural choice to perform the deed, but Valenti did not count on my being involved, and Hector did not expect Badger to be there as well. He stared at Badger’s outstretched hand with visible contempt.
“No hard feelings, paco,” said Badger, doing his best to provoke an already-annoyed man.
Hector looked to me for an explanation.
“Another set of eyes can’t hurt,” I told him. He didn’t like it but he didn’t have much of a choice as we were an hour away from the appointed time. “Do you have the money?” I asked Hector because that felt like the right thing to do, though the idea that he would forget the money on the night of the drop was absurd.
Despite all that, Hector moved around to the back of the sedan and opened the trunk for us. Three million in cash was surprisingly smaller than I anticipated. I envisioned a forklift and a heavy pallet but instead got a medium-sized duffel bag. But it was heavy — very heavy.
For a moment while holding that bag, I felt the warmth and comforts of being a millionaire. And I had an impulse to bolt. I heard Badger grunt behind me. Even Hector cast a sly, little smile. This was the moment when someone would casually suggest the money getting lost and the three of us running off to Mexico. Hector squelched that dream by snatching the bag from my hand and replacing it in the bed of the trunk.
We went over the plan while standing there in the bakery parking lot. Hector would deliver the money as expected. He was going to enter the south side of the park, off of Spring Street. Badger with his WWII battleship binoculars would position himself on the Gold Line platform towards the west end of the park that offered an elevated and unobstructed view of the entire area. I would wait in my car on the north side of the park on Broadway. This also offered an elevated view of the area as the land gradually sloped upwards towards Elysian Park, the 110 freeway, and Dodger Stadium. But it also was an exposed area with very little cover and almost no human activity at night. I needed to be careful lest I was spotted before the drop could be made.
The idea was that once Hector delivered the money to the requested spot, Badger and I would watch the area for the individual who picked it up. Part of me wished it would be Jeanette, despite the complications that would involve. But deep down I knew it was an unlikely scenario. The more logical outcome would be that whoever picked up the money was behind her disappearance, and possible death. We weren’t going to let that person out of our sight.
“I’m on point,” Badger explained. “I can reconnoiter from the shield wall on the platform.” Badger was using an inordinate amount of military lingo for my taste and I could see it was grating on Hector as well.
“If you screw this up,” Hector warned, “I will kill you.”
“Listen, chief, I know what I’m doing.”
“He does this for a living,” I added but had little effect on changing Hector’s overall mood.
“You brought him,” Hector reminded me. It was clear that in Hector’s mind, the threat towards Badger also included me. We all wanted to do this right, but Hector was the only one with something to really lose.
We tested our cell phones for good coverage and established a three-way text as a communication channel. As Badger’s “ROGER THAT” text buzzed in, Hector stomped off to his sedan and drove away.
Badger set off to the train station on foot, while I got in my car and drove the short distance down the road to a spot just on the edge of complete desolation where the industrial buildings ended and the run down to the L.A. River began. There was a bus stop inexplicably placed on this stretch of road like a last stop to nowhere. Even more perplexing than its existence was the fact that four or five people were waiting in the glass structure. It looked like a perfect cover for me to watch the proceedings in the park below.
I shuffled over to the bus shelter and mingled among the riders. There were two old Asian ladies with canvas sacks full of leafy vegetables and what appeared to be a plastic bag of chicken feet. The other three were Latino laborers either coming from or on their way to a nondescript manufacturing center on the other side of the river. They had the tired eyes of someone on the eternal night shift.
The tie and jacket were left behind in the backseat of my car but I was still odd man out in my pressed pants and recently-shined loafers. And while the coterie of late evening riders watched with longing eyes for any signs of the bus emerging from the flickering neon of old Chinatown, I was fixated on the black pool of park below me, a flat mass broken only by evenly-spaced lampposts and their white circles of light.
My cell phone hummed with a text from Badger: “IN POSITION.” I replied that I was in position as well, but a third confirmation never came from Hector. Not that I expected one, but it would be better if we communicated at a high level during this. I regretted not giving my “over-communication” lecture before we disbanded from the bakery parking lot. It was ingrained in the corporate world that there is no such thing as too much communication. This pervasive “feedback loop” resulted in inboxes filling up with “FYI” emails at a five-per-minute clip. But in a scenario like the one we were in, knowing everything was vital.
It was still five minutes from the appointed time when Hector was to deliver the duffel bag of money, but that didn’t keep me from checking my watch every thirty seconds. Of all the people in the bus shelter, I was the most impatient. They had the resigned looks of people waiting for a ride that was perpetually late.
That’s when I spotted Hector.
He was a solitary figure in a white shirt that flared up as he passed under each pool of lamplight. He moved with purpose despite the heavy load slung over his shoulder. I scanned the park but saw no other activity. He was close to the drop point, a garbage can near the center of the park.
“LOCKED ON TARGET” came the text from Badger.
Hector approached the garbage can and let the heavy duffel slip from his shoulder into his hand. He placed the bag on the ground right on the edge of the cone of light from a nearby lamp. I could barely make out the dark
lump from this distance. Hector turned and headed back towards Spring Street.
Around me came the rustling of bags and shuffling feet. Barreling down on us was the 762 bus to Boyle Heights, a brightly-lit number with a few ghost-like passengers and a driver cast in shadow. As my shelter-mates formed a makeshift line, I turned back to the park and looked for any activity. There was none. I strained my eyes on the spot where Hector left the bag but couldn’t quite make out if it was still there. I shielded my eyes from the glare of the oncoming headlights but still struggled to see anything in the darkness. The whine of bus brakes squelched behind me and the doors exhaled to let on the passengers. After a moment came a voice.
“You coming?” asked the driver. I waved him off without turning around. “There ain’t no other bus than this one,” he came again.
“I’m good, I’m good,” I said.
The driver brought the doors in and pulled back into the street, leaving a plume of exhaust that got caught up in the shelter.
“TARGET IS IN PLAY” came another text from Badger.
Again I scanned the area but didn’t see anything. I replied, asking for clarification.
“HAS THE BAG MOVED?”
“TARGET IS IN PLAY” repeated the text.
“FOR FUCK’S SAKE HAS THE BAG MOVED?” I rattled back.
Badger replied with one word: “AFFIRMATIVE”
I saw nothing, just the same dark landscape with the white polka-dots. But then something moved in and out of one of those dots. I quickly trained my eye on the next one and after a moment the figure appeared again under its harsh light and then slipped back into the black. It looked like a man pushing something. My eyes jumped ahead and waited. He came into view again and this time I got a better look at him. He wore a long, dark coat and pushed a shopping cart filled with something a good foot above its sides. He moved back into the darkness.
It gave me time to type my question: “THE HOMELESS GUY?”
“AFFIRMATIVE”, came the response.
This time, Hector chimed in: “DON’T LOSE HIM”
The Eternal Summer (Chuck Restic Private Investigator Series Book 2) Page 17
