The Perpetual Summer

by Adam Walker Phillips

  I positioned myself below the open window and made the very doable, bottom-of-the-net leap to reach the sill. I gritted my teeth and pulled myself into the room. On the floor was a pair of binoculars a third of the size Badger used for a similar purpose earlier that night. The presence of the binoculars led me to wonder if more people than just Tala were involved in the ransom. My mind leapt to Jeanette but I dispelled that notion—for now, anyway.

  With the filing cabinet and desks and papers piled on top, it appeared to be an office of a still-operating business. I remained at the foot of the window and strained my ears for any sounds coming from the other rooms. It was as quiet as the street outside. The only sound in my ears was from my own heartbeat thumping away. I made my way to the door, careful not to trip on anything and call attention to my presence.

  The hallway was empty. The only light came from the room to my left. I stood for what felt like twenty minutes but was just a single minute. I took out my cell and texted Hector and Badger.

  “I’M INSIDE.”

  The reply was immediate. From whom, I wasn’t sure, but the phone buzzed in my hand and broke the silence in the hallway.

  I thought I heard a click. I waited, my eyes fixed on the door a few feet from me, but nothing happened. I detected movement inside, or rather, the faintest shift in the half-light as something, or someone, passed in front of the light’s source. I concentrated on my breathing but nothing could suppress the sounds emanating from my chest. It felt like anyone outside on the street could hear my panicked attempts at air.

  The barrel of a gun slowly emerged from behind the doorjamb, then the pudgy hand that held onto it. Tala stepped fully out of the room. She seemed focused in the opposite direction toward the stairwell that led below. It hadn’t occurred to her that someone might be behind her.

  I could have done several things—rush her while my position was still unknown, turn back into the darkened room and leap to safety onto the loading dock roof below—but I did nothing. These were options somewhere in the recesses of my mind but they never fully emerged.

  As if sensing something behind her, she slowly turned and faced me. She looked around with a slightly perplexed look. I watched her go through the thought process as she put the pieces together—someone found me, it isn’t the police, he is alone. The gun rose ever so slightly, the grip firmed up on the butt.

  There was a whir of black behind her as a figure approached. As it passed the lit room, I saw Hector’s face illuminated in the yellow light, then move back into the shadows. He came up behind her with mechanical, almost robotic efficiency. His arm went over the one holding the gun, there was a glint of silver from his knife, and then I heard something that I thought sounded like a woman’s laugh, but wasn’t. I watched how effortlessly the arm with the gun came down. The hallway flashed bright, followed by a roar as the gun discharged a bullet into the floorboards. I covered one of my ears, trying desperately to get at the dull tone drilling inside my head.

  It looked like Tala wanted to sit down, to rest a spell after a long day of work at the hospital. Hector obliged by hooking one arm under her shoulder, which was now black with her own blood, and gently lowering her down. The extent of what he had done hit him as he stared at his own stained hands. She sat there on her folded-up legs in an awkward pose on the floor. One arm propped her upright but strained under the weight and didn’t look like it would hold much longer. A large pool grew rapidly around her, far quicker than I ever thought possible. I stared at the expanding ring and wished it would stop. It didn’t.

  The sounds that started coming out of her were a quiet plea that I knew would go unanswered. They were so feminine and fragile. And I fought the urge to rush to her side and if nothing else, just hold her in my arms, because I knew it was too late. Instead, I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch it. But the sound didn’t go away.

  I’d never heard anything like that in my life and I wished to all’s end that I never would again.

  NO KIDS

  Badger showed up a short time later and surveyed the scene. When he saw the body lying in the hallway, he calmly approached and felt for a pulse on Tala’s neck even though by the way she lay there it was clear she was dead. He used the backs of his fingers, felt nothing, then rose and checked his watch. It felt to me like the moves of someone whose next move was to flee and pretend he was never there—no fingerprints on the skin, no evidence at all to place him at the scene. I expected him to request that Hector and I leave him out of the entire story we told the police. And I didn’t blame him in the least. He had more experience than I did in what lay ahead for us and he was wise to not want to experience it.

  “It’s ten-forty,” he announced. “We call 911 first but we call our lawyers immediately afterward. Let’s make sure we have the numbers handy because this thing will go down faster than you ever thought possible.”

  Badger wasn’t running, and I felt sorry for doubting him. He called 911 and told them the minimum amount of facts. It appeared the operator was trying to pump him for more information but he hung up. He then called his lawyer and filled him in. I took Badger’s lead and called the only lawyer I knew, my ex-wife Claire. As a commercial real estate attorney she knew nothing about criminal law, but she was all I had. I also held this growing need to be near someone I knew and Claire was the closest person I had in all of Los Angeles.

  I got her voicemail.

  “Claire, it’s me. I think I am about to be arrested. I’m in Chinatown so not sure where I will be held. Can you help?” Before I hung up, I felt the need to add, “Sorry to bother you with this. I’m in trouble.”

  Hector didn’t call anyone. Badger and I pleaded with him, but he ignored our requests. After the few words he whispered when Tala died—“I only tried to stop her”—he refused to speak at all. I thought of calling Valenti directly but worried that would only complicate matters. Hector could have easily placed the call to the old man himself but he chose not to. I didn’t know his reasons but I respected them.

  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 bloodied 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 pink where he had tried to wipe the tears away with bloodstained hands.

  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 on 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 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 where this nightmare began. 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. Every now and then she told me bits of what she’d learned, like how Hector’s knife had hit a hard-to-reach artery that caused Tala’s quick death. I didn’t speak, just let her words float over me.

  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 signaled 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 tabletop as she placed the cup back down. It felt good to be near her. But there was a vague emptiness about the whole thing. I was no closer to finding Jeanette, and the hope that I eventually would didn’t seem like much of a hope at all. Lingering behind all of this was a question I never intended to ask 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 a 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 the unfinished business of recent events that increased my desire to see something through to its end. I was tired of all those unfulfilled reminders piling up behind me and couldn’t face Jeanette’s eventual addition to the list. Or maybe it was just that I despised Pat so much I wanted to make his decision to deny me the role as difficult as possible. Whatever the reason, 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 head 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 list 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 overcoming 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 unpop
ular as they may seem in the moment, that will pay off in the future.”

  I thought the man, 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 feels slowed down, when 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, when 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.