Badger was right. The “mess” was on us faster than I thought possible. The siren wails grew louder with each passing second and soon were joined by heavy footsteps on the stairwell. Radio squawks joined the cacophony of sounds coming at us. Per Badger’s suggestion, we sat together on the floor with our backs against the wall and our hands clasped over the tops of our heads. At least Badger and I did the last part. Hector joined us on the floor but his arms remained by his sides, his palms face-up in a resigned pose. As the cool-white glare of heavy flashlights danced in the hallways, I caught a brief glimpse of Hector’s face. He looked drained and lost and his cheeks glistened where he had tried to wipe the tears away.
***
I never felt exhaustion like I experienced in the period that followed. I remember snippets of what eventually became a two-day ordeal, but they seem like scenes haphazardly cut together from several different movies.
There was an interrogation room that was as cold as a walk-in refrigerator. I recall pulling my arms in through my sleeves and wrapping them across my chest in an attempt to retain what little heat emanated from my core. I would have done anything for a shred of blanket so I could curl up in the corner of the linoleum floor and go to sleep.
I remember an odd combination of odors — pancakes and radiator steam — so strikingly familiar that a rush of memories from my third grade classroom came back with such clarity that it felt like I was sitting in that second row again under the paper mobiles dangling from the ceiling.
And I remember a uniformed officer of pronounced age who escorted me in and out of rooms with the gentleness of a nursemaid. He had the saddest eyes I had ever seen and forever had this look like he would one day walk out the front door and never come back.
I did a lot of talking over those two days but can’t recall much of anything that I said. They asked the same questions over and over again and even I grew tired of my answers and felt the urge to change it up just for the hell of it. If my responses failed to stop the repeated asking of the same questions then I assumed something was wrong with my answers. For a fleeting moment I even bandied about the notion of telling them that I was the one who held the knife and was ultimately the killer but self-survival kept me from making that mistake. Not that they would have believed me anyway.
With distance from the onslaught of interrogations it became clear that they weren’t interested in me. It was in the questions they asked and in the tone they asked them. They spoke to me like a child, half filling me in, half asking me to fill in the holes for them. All of their questions revolved around the “how” more than anything.
How did Valenti come to hire me to find his granddaughter?
How did I find out there were ransom notes?
How did the first payment happen?
They had Hector, but more importantly, they wanted the puppeteer manipulating the strings. They operated on the assumption that every murder follows a logical path, and this one followed a winding little road back to the old man himself. Tala’s murder, and perhaps even Morgan’s, were part of some conspiracy. Perhaps the murders weren’t pre-planned but they were certainly deliberate. And I was just the rube they used along the way when it helped their cause.
After some time, a suited man appeared in more and more discussions and seemed to be on my side. He was introduced as my lawyer though I didn’t recognize the face and was certain we had never met. But he clearly wanted to help me and for that I was grateful. I came to rely on his presence so much that when he left the room I had this instinct to run after him, lest he leave me behind and never come back. But he always came back.
On his last visit he led me through a maze of hallways and forms and ultimately deposited me into a parking lot where I was greeted by damp night air and the hum of air conditioning units.
Claire was there to give me a ride home. I didn’t know where my car was — impounded in a lot somewhere — and I didn’t have the energy or the sense to find it. We drove through the near-empty streets out of downtown and unwittingly passed the Cornfields park that began this nightmare. Not that I really noticed or cared. I was exhausted and felt detached from everything around me. I could smell the new-car leather and feel the gentle heat of the seat warmers but it didn’t seem like I was actually there in the passenger seat with Claire as the city went by.
We stopped at an all-night donut shop in Highland Park. It was expectedly empty at three in the morning. The lone worker manning the shift no one wanted shot us an annoyed look that we were rudely intruding on the private world she occupied every night and every early morning.
We sat at a yellow Formica table in a booth by the window under the garish glow of fluorescent lights. We drank scorched coffee, and I forced myself to eat a fritter just to have something in my stomach. As the crappy coffee took its effect and the rhythmic ticking of the lights overhead provided a beat that I could fall in line with, I slowly started to feel okay again. I found myself listening to the subtle sounds of Claire drinking coffee, her bracelet rattling on the table top as she placed the cup back down. It felt good to be near her. But there was a vague emptiness about the entire thing. And my mind kept coming back to this lingering question that I had no intention of asking but felt compelled to anyway.
“Why didn’t we have kids?”
Poor Claire gave her best shot at a reason but it was clear that she didn’t have the answer either.
THE INTERVIEW
The job to lead the department was out of reach before the first interview even started. Because of the nature of our industry, the firm required associates to hold to strict standards of conduct in their lives outside the office. That didn’t mean one couldn’t cheat on his wife or screw a friend out of money. Those were considered private issues no matter how public they often became. The firm was more interested in official legal issues, such as DUI, urinating in public, or getting arrested for manslaughter and conspiracy charges in a botched blackmailing scheme.
For a firm that was intrinsically risk-averse and for a job whose sole purpose was to keep the company from being sued, the idea that they would choose someone with so many questions around him was a dim option.
I knew Paul would make sure he brought my extracurricular activities to the attention of the key decision-makers in the hiring process. He wouldn’t do it in such a straightforward way as, “Did you hear about Chuck?” No, he would find some back-door method like sending out a memo requesting any updates to the Code of Conduct Handbook or promoting a new study on recidivism of persons who have committed misdemeanors.
The idea of reporting to Paul made me shudder, and I let myself drift off with the daydream of quitting before it became official, but deep down inside I knew I wouldn’t do that. I had it too good to be throwing it all away because I didn’t like guys with ponytails.
I still had to go through the motions of the interview for a job I never wanted and now had zero chance of getting. But despite all of that, I wasn’t ready to roll over. Perhaps it was all of the unfinished business of recent events that increased my desire to see something through to its end. Or maybe it was just that I despised Pat so much that I wanted to make his decision to deny me the role as difficult as possible. Either way, I wasn’t going down easy.
The first round was with the recruiting representative from HR. And although I was four times her senior in the same department, protocol dictated that she kick off the interview slate. She showed up in a tailored business suit that looked new. I smiled internally at the act because in many ways this was more an interview for her with the future lead of the department than it was for me as the potential future head. She needed to make a good impression and thus was more nervous than I was. I helped guide her through the standard slate of questions and we got into a nice rhythm. It felt good to loosen up a bit on questions straight out of the manual I helped pen.
“Tell me about a time when one of your ideas was not adopted and how did you react?” was the question to probe on overcomin
g adversity.
“If you had to change one thing over the last five years in your career, what would it be?” was a way to get insight on someone’s self-reflection tendencies.
My preparation for this portion of the interview was to drop key words from the job description in each of my responses.
“…foster a collaborative environment…build integrated capabilities…nurture cross-functionality between groups…”
The poor thing literally made check marks on her paper each time I used one of these phrases. By the end of it she was almost ready to shout, “You’re hired!” I thanked her for her time and then commended her on a very well-run interview.
I didn’t let this cream-puff session lull me into complacency. The interviews that remained would get successively more difficult and less predictable as I went through the day.
We transitioned out of the gobbledygook of HR into the business world with its own set of fabricated jargon. The important thing to remember was that the interview was not about me. The interview was all about the person asking the questions. If you could unlock them and answer accordingly then your chances of getting hired were greatly increased.
So when the head of IT asked me how the firm’s culture influenced results, I knew what he was really asking. The question reflected his concern that a stodgy management was slow to adapt with the times and spend money on new technologies.
“A firm that does not evolve constrains its long-term viability,” I began. “The challenge is,” (there are no problems, just challenges) “to make the hard decisions now, as unpopular as they may seem in the moment, that will pay off in the future.”
I thought the man, he with his ever-shrinking budget and zero respect internally for the thankless job he performed admirably day-in and day-out, was going to leap across the table and kiss me. I might have said nothing, but he found an ally.
I did this dance for hours and I loved every minute of it. It was as close as I could get to that feeling athletes have when the game is slowed down, where they see every move before it happens. I was making shit up left-and-right and it all went down as easily as soft-serve ice cream. And with each interview I slowly began to convince myself that I might have a chance at this job after all.
During the lunch portion, I purposely avoided carbs and caffeine. I didn’t need a post-sugar crash to mess with my rhythm. I ran into a little trouble at the two o’clock portion with the head of administrative assistants where we got sideways on my approach to associate development (for dead-end jobs) but I quickly rescued it with a clever turn of a phrase involving “stepping-stones” and “paths to career fulfillment.”
The three and four o’clock interviews with the Head of Operations and Chief Compliance Officer respectively were victories before they even began. It was as if they sensed when they entered the room that they were about to talk to the man who had the job. I didn’t let hubris get the better of me and I battled in those sessions with equal vigor. By the time they were over I felt like I could go twelve more rounds.
The final interview was with Pat Faber. The room was now stuffy from the late afternoon sun pouring in and from all the hot air puffed over the last seven hours. I bounced out of my chair to greet him by the door. We each attempted to out-pump the other with a handshake, and I gleefully registered the disappointment on his face. He expected an exhausted man. Instead, he saw someone who was ready to uppercut him into oblivion. Pat rose to the challenge.
“What does failure look like?”
“A man who accepts things as ‘good enough’.”
“What’s the one thing you would change about yourself?”
“Nothing. The first step is recognizing your faults then figuring out how to succeed despite them.”
“What would you change about me?”
“Ask easier questions.”
“Why shouldn’t we select Paul for the job?”
“I want to be selected on my strengths, not on another man’s weaknesses.”
They kept coming, and I kept knocking them down. I took the best he had, and Pat knew it. By the end of it he looked more tired than I felt. He leaned back and offered up one more, a true softball if there ever was one.
“What will be your legacy?” he asked.
All I had to do was come up with a pithy reply about generational change and throw in some anecdote to seal it. Victory sat right in front of me. But I didn’t take it. I just sat there and said nothing. An uneasiness settled over the room. I detected a trace of glee as Pat watched me struggle.
The simple question had the effect of smelling-salts under my nose. I was suddenly overcome with the clarity that comes from complete detachment. We were talking, after all, about a legacy of a body of work that had no meaning. And then I remembered Bob Gershon, the gentle giant who learned that fact too late in his career to do anything about it. I saw his face as if he were there in the room with me. I watched him disappear behind the elevator doors.
One can only fake it for so long. I shook off my stupor and focused in on Pat.
“I probably won’t have one,” I answered, which was the first bit of honesty I muttered all day. “And if I were ever fortunate enough to have a legacy, I hope to God it wouldn’t be for this job.”
***
I noticed it first. I was on my way to lunch and spotted the black sedan parked in the loading zone in front of my building. These were common vehicles for executives getting rides to the airport but there was something about this one that caught my attention. In similar situations the drivers would do a quick pick-up or drop-off and linger for no more than the time it took to get the luggage out of the trunk. For those who had to wait for a dawdling CEO, the driver would usually fill the time polishing the windows. But this sedan sat idling, the tinted windows obscuring whoever was behind the glass.
I was foolish to let myself believe it was Hector inside there. His legal issues were far from over and there was no way he would be back into his old routine of driving Valenti around the city. I did secretly wish it was him. I wanted to see if he was okay. I also had many questions to ask him.
I circled around the sedan and went the long way to the sandwich shop across the street. Returning to the office, I saw the sedan still idling. As I started to cross the street, a voice called out.
“Can we talk?” Valenti asked. I went around to the other side and joined him in the front seat. He caught my bemused look at the image of him driving his own car. “I drove a truck when I was younger,” he shot back. “I’m not that completely out of touch with the real world.”
The air conditioner was pumping a steady stream of cold air that made the hair on my forearms stand up. As if sensing this, he lowered it to a gentle breeze.
“Anything I can do to help smooth things over at work?” he offered. “I could place a call.”
Even Valenti’s influence couldn’t undo all the damage I had done. I declined his offer. “I like to think I got myself into this situation and it’s on me to get myself out.”
“Still have that chip on your shoulder,” said Valenti.
“How’s Hector?” I asked.
“Hector will be fine.” Then appended, “legally, that is.”
“Has he been released?”
“Yes, he is out but has some charges lingering that we can hopefully get cleared up soon.” There was paternal pride in his voice. “We have the right folks working on it.”
I didn’t have a delicate way of broaching the subject of Jeanette and decided to just ask it outright.
“Have you heard from her?”
The man deflated. His only response came in the form of a barely-perceptible shrug. Faced with an outcome he didn’t want to accept, I got the sense he was here as part of a last-ditch effort to find some scrap of hope to keep him from avoiding the inevitable. I was tempted to oblige but couldn’t seem to muster up a lie.
“I’m sorry,” I said instead.
He turned away from me and placed his hand on the
shifter. I took that as the signal that our brief encounter was finished.
“Who’s going to take care of this old man?” he asked absently.
All this talk about fortunes and inheritances and cycles of wealth suddenly felt insignificant. The old man was now an elderly man with elderly concerns.
As I stepped out of the car, he said behind me, “I’ll always remember the last time I saw her. Never let that happen to you.”
It was a personal admonishment framed as advice. But it was the worst form of advice — the kind given after it was too late to do anything about it.
I went back to the office and called Detective Ricohr. I was losing sense of why I made the decisions I did other than this one just felt like the right thing to do. I needed to know some things about Jeanette.
He called me back later in the afternoon. He was more cheerful than I anticipated. I had caused this man nothing short of grief with my amateurish meddling. I would have swatted me away a long time before, but Detective Ricohr had a far deeper reserve of patience than I ever did.
“There was no evidence of the girl or baby in the building where it happened,” he told me after the preamble about how he shouldn’t be telling me this information, that it is still an ongoing investigation, etc. He was probably doing it for the recording machines at police headquarters. “And no evidence of her being at the victim’s condo,” he preempted my question.
“What’s the collective view on the kidnapping?”
“There’s some disagreement. Most think she and the Portillo boy were in on it all along, that it was some sort of blackmailing scheme. What they had on the old man no one is really sure. A minority think they were just two dumb kids duped into participating. In both scenarios we think she and the baby are dead. That’s the one area where everyone agrees.”
I thought that through but something didn’t fit.
“You don’t like it,” he stated.
“I am not sure I know enough to like or not like it,” I told him. “But it doesn’t seem right.”
The Eternal Summer (Chuck Restic Private Investigator Series Book 2) Page 19
