Текст книги "The Eternal Summer"
Автор книги: Paul MacDonald
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
EVERYTHING’S ROSES
It struck me later as I was driving back home.
I had stopped off at the office to catch up on work and on the drive home I took the surface route back to Eagle Rock. The normal path involved a series of short jaunts on multiple freeways and at this time of day, taking the full brunt of traffic jams from multiple interchanges was not wise.
I wound my way over to the river and took Riverside up the western shore that skirted Silver Lake and then Los Feliz. Before fully entering into Griffith Park I crossed over the interstate at Colorado and then traversed the river and came into the backside of Glendale.
This section of Colorado Boulevard was stuck in another era, when it was the main route for hundreds of thousands of tourists coming to Los Angeles. Old motels with colorful names and even more colorful signs crowded long stretches. Many were flower-themed and played off the Rose Bowl even though that structure was a good seven miles from here. I imagined the disappointment when a family of four from Akron drove all the way to Los Angeles to the Roses Motel and found one of these. The signs were now rusted in spots and the swimming pools were mostly filled in with concrete.
I had used this road many times and always wondered how they stayed in business. The freeways that skirted Colorado long drew away any sort of tourist traffic and yet a good portion of these motels remained. They had to have some sort of trade. Prostitution, I imagined, was a big source. But what about a young couple on the lam?
I quickly ruled it out. A newborn had to attract a lot of attention. And the couple couldn’t have much in the way of resources. Jeanette didn’t have a credit card. According to Meredith it was Valenti’s attempt to raise a blue-blooded cheapskate. Perhaps Nelson had some money but it was probably not enough to pay for an extended stay at even the cheapest of these motels.
It all led to the suspicion they were staying at a friendly residence where they could remain undisturbed for free. As I progressed along Colorado from Glendale into Eagle Rock proper, I went through the list of possibilities. Neither Jeanette nor Nelson had many friends, if any at all, and even if they did those friends would have parents who most likely would not be willing participants in these sorts of shenanigans. Relatives were another idea that I quickly ruled out as far as Jeanette’s side – no one would cross Valenti, not even Jeff’s family. Nelson’s family was a distinct possibility.
And that’s when it struck me. They were meaningless words when I first heard them, just an annoyed neighbor with an eye-sore of crab-grass suffocating the yard next door and threatening to invade his perfectly-groomed turf. The home was not being cared for and was bringing down the property values of those around it. He hoped I was there to do something about it. I remembered the house looking overly-unkempt, bordering on abandoned. But then the neighbor’s words said otherwise.
“They’re not home,” he told me.
Sheila Lansing had mentioned that she was a reluctant resident of the convalescent home. Such people often hold onto their past lives on the slim hope that they will someday be able to return to them. The empty house served as the perfect hideout.
As I reached my street I quickly made a U-turn and headed back to the freeway that would take me to Pacoima.
***
I could barely hear the doorbell over the whine of the leaf blower from the neighbor next door. I stepped back off the front stoop and watched the curtained windows for any sign of movement, but none came. I then walked the perimeter of the house just in case the occupants were prone to fleeing, but on this day I hoped they wouldn’t because the heat was excessively oppressive.
At the back of the house the yard was in even greater need for maintenance than the front. The dirt was like powder and coated my shoes in a thin film. I found the garbage cans around the side of the house. The fact that they had contents confirmed there were people living in the house. The existence of several used diaper bundles convinced me the occupants were who I was looking for.
“Can I help you?” asked an irritated voice.
The nosy neighbor held the silenced leaf blower like a shotgun.
“You know the people that live here?” I asked.
“Who are you?” he replied.
“We met before, remember?”
“Yeah, but who are you?” he persisted.
“I work for the original owner. The people staying here aren’t supposed to be.”
“No kidding? They’re squatters? But they seemed so nice.”
“Is there anyone else staying here with them? Maybe another woman, a little overweight, dark?”
“Nope, there’s none of that going on here,” he said defensively. His mind clearly went to a darker place than I implied. It felt like the neighbor still felt protective of the young couple. I decided to ease off lest he stir something up before I could talk to them.
“Well, I’ll swing by later to see if they are home,” I said casually.
“Hey,” he called after me, “don’t go getting them into any trouble.” He wagged his finger at me. “They’re good kids, you know.”
“I know,” I waved back and returned to my car.
I drove around the block and parked further down the street where I could still have a good view of Sheila’s house but wasn’t in a direct sightline of the overly-protective neighbor. I didn’t want him to see me and bring the local police down for questioning.
MAN LEFT IN CAR
I was a case study for why you should never leave your dog in a parked car. Even with the windows rolled down, the temperature inside was well over one hundred. I had a half-filled water bottle from a previous purchase that was warm enough to make sun tea. I futilely angled the visor to keep some of the sun off of my face but I didn’t want to completely obstruct the view of the house and so I was forced to get the full brunt of the rays. An hour in, I hit a point of woozy bliss where the body is covered in a sheen of perspiration and the breaths are short and metered and hypnotic. With every passing car I angled my head to catch the slightest of breezes they cast which were as refreshing as a tall glass of ice water. After about the fifth one of these I kept my head in that position leaning against the door frame. That’s when I saw a set of eyes staring at me from across the street.
It was Nelson.
The adrenaline shot through me and I awoke from my lethargic state. His body started to lean, and I knew he was going to try to make a break for it.
“Kid, don’t make me run. It’s too hot,” I pleaded. His eyes hung with me but his shoulders slowly swung around. “Come on, you couldn’t outrun me in a million years.”
He tried anyway.
I flung open the door in pursuit and fell flat on my face. My knees had buckled on the first step. The asphalt burned my palms and the tender skin on my forearms. Scrambling to my feet my head swirled from the quick movements and from the heat off the pavement. For a moment I thought I might vomit.
“Will you stop?” I shouted, but Nelson had no intention of obeying my command. I was more annoyed than anything because despite the head start he hadn’t made it very far down the street. And now I had to run, jog maybe, to catch up to him.
Nelson fumbled with his cell phone. He was a slow runner made impossibly slower when trying to text and run at the same time. My head cleared somewhat and I gave pursuit. I got within five feet of him long before he reached the intersection and by the end of it he was so gassed that I briskly walked up behind him and horse-collared him to a halt.
“Stop with this nonsense, already,” I said and wiped the prodigious amount of sweat off my hand that came from the back of his shirt. “Who are you texting?” I asked but didn’t wait for a reply. I snatched the phone out of his hand and read the latest text: Don’t come home. I didn’t have to read the recipient’s name because I already knew it was Jeanette. “Nice,” I grumbled and handed him back the phone. “Let’s go talk inside. I hope you have air conditioning in that house.”
The living room was mired in an early 1980s remodel. The coffee table and TV console were made of lacquered blonde wood. The floral-print wallpaper bubbled in spots and was starting to peel at the corners near the popcorn ceiling. It harkened back memories of my parents’ living room and getting a lecture for missing curfew.
“Listen, kid, I meant what I said before. I want to help you. If I didn’t, don’t you think the cops would be here right now?”
Nelson wasn’t buying it, and I didn’t think he ever would. He spooked Jeanette with the text he sent her, and if I had any hope of her ever coming back I was going to need him to help.
“Give me your money,” I demanded. Nelson looked at me like I was mad. “Come on, give me your money. Don’t tell me you guys are broke already?” I shook my head, “That rules out that option. Jesus, this is a mess.”
It was the first step from a persuasive selling technique called “controlled drowning.” The idea was to present the subject with several scenarios that all ended in locked doors. By gradually building on each hopeless scenario you could then dangle a solution that they never thought existed. The technique was undoubtedly developed by former Black Ops specialists.
I built an airtight case for gloom. They didn’t have enough money to last a week. They didn’t have the friends or relatives who would be willing to help them. And then add the unavoidable fact that the authorities wanted him for questioning in a murder case. Eventually they would track him down.
“I didn’t do anything to her,” he cried. He tried to elaborate but the words stumbled out in an incoherent babble. The boy rocked in the chair.
“All right, take it easy. I know you didn’t have anything to do with it.” I let him come a few steps back from the edge before giving him another shove. “The detective on the case seems like a reasonable guy but you never know with cops. They’re a stubborn bunch and they got one and only one suspect – you.”
“But I didn’t do it,” he said.
“Sure, but these guys’ job is to close the case. That doesn’t necessarily mean closing it with the guilty party going to jail. We just somehow have to convince these guys that you are innocent,” I said but shook my head like what I had just uttered was a next-to-impossible task.
“How’s the baby doing?” I asked. I needed to ease into this part lest he completely shut down. “What’s his name?” I asked, even leaning back in the sofa to ease the tension.
“Holden,” he muttered.
“Catcher in the Rye fans?”
“Yeah.”
“Great book,” I lied. I thought it was great when I was too young to know better. “You left the father out of that decision, huh?”
“What do you mean?” he asked looking a little hurt.
“I’m sorry. I assumed you weren’t the dad.”
“He’s mine,” he stated.
“Nelson,” I said, leaning back in, “I have no doubt that you can and will be a great father, but you’re not the father.”
“It doesn’t matter who it is,” he said after a moment. It sounded like even he didn’t know the identity of the father.
“No, I get it. But obviously the courts won’t see it our way.”
That one had a greater impact than I thought it would. I had successfully maneuvered the kid to the point of total despair. It was time to bring him back. What was supposed to feel like a moment of triumph instead made me feel ashamed.
I convinced him to meet Jeanette and the three of us would contact the authorities. I would hire them a lawyer and be with them every step of the way. Nelson nodded his head in resigned acceptance to my plan.
There was a knock on the front door. We looked to each other for an explanation.
“Jeanette?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” but there was hope in his voice.
“Could be the neighbor next door,” I said.
We were both wrong.
“Hello,” smiled Detective Ricohr but there was nothing cheerful about it. “Can I come in?” he asked as he crossed into the living room.
Nelson stood by the couch as the Detective and the local police streamed into the increasingly cramped space. Through all the chaos Nelson never took his eyes off me.
“Sit down, son,” Detective Ricohr instructed. “It wasn’t Mr. Restic’s fault. Not intentionally, anyway.” He turned to me. “I took a gamble and put someone on you. I had a feeling you knew more than you let on.”
We all walked out together into the late afternoon sun. It sat low on the horizon and felt hotter than it actually was. The police activity attracted many onlookers from the surrounding homes, including the neighbor on the left. I avoided his gaze but I knew it was directed at me. I was getting tired of disappointing people.
***
Detective Ricohr rode with me on the long drive back to downtown. We were like a couple of travelers forced into intimacy on an oversold bus. There were no TVs to distract us and nowhere at all to escape.
We talked about anything and everything – the sectarian violence in the Middle East which neither of us really understood, the inanity of the Los Angeles highway system where major feeds crossed each other and somehow didn’t have connectors, the wild idea to have the concrete-encased LA river return to its natural state. Detective Ricohr was more of a revealer than me, and I heard all about his various ailments, his divorce from twelve years ago, and the three kids from the marriage. Two things we did not talk about were the weather and the murder case.
I dropped him off on First Street in front of police central headquarters.
“What’s going to happen to Nelson?” I asked.
“We’ll just talk to him for a few hours and see what we can get and then send him home.”
“He probably won’t say much.”
“That’s what everyone thinks. Until they get in there.”
“No, I just don’t think he knows much about the girl’s murder.”
“You said before that you thought the murder and the old man’s missing granddaughter were connected.”
“I think the Valenti girl has the information, not this kid.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be hanging with you.”
“What’s he paying you, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“Nothing. He fired me.”
Detective Ricohr mulled that over. He let two late commuter buses pass by with their roaring engines and plumes of exhaust.
“If you find the girl, do you find my killer?”
“When I find the girl and talk to her, your killer should become very clear.”
“You hope.”
“You hope,” I corrected.
“We both hope,” he finished and headed into the building.
“Detective,” I called him back. “I’m sorry for not telling you everything ahead of time. And you may not believe it, but I was going to call you after I had spoken to the kid.”
“Save the apology for later,” he said. “I suspect this won’t be the last time you disappoint me.”
Tired as I was, I headed in the opposite direction of my house and drove out towards the Westside. I stopped at a diner just off the 10 freeway and sat in one of the booths by the window. I picked at a tuna melt and fries but mostly I watched the heavy stream of traffic funneling on and off the freeway. There was something hypnotic about it. After the third time I was asked for a water refill, I got the hint and decided to give them their booth back.
Time never moves slower than when you are trying to kill it. I drove aimlessly around the side streets but that was only good for a half hour. I did a couple of tricks of randomly picking destinations and then driving there and back a few times like a runner doing track work. Finally I gave up and drove over to Nelson’s house and parked in one of the few open spots on the street.
I don’t know how long it took because I dozed off a few times but eventually a car appeared and parked in the narrow driveway. Nelson squeezed out of the passenger door and headed for the house with his tatted-up brother at his side. If I factored in all of the wasted time in and around any visit to a police station, the fact that Nelson was home before midnight was a bit of a miracle. Detective Ricohr had kept to his word.
I wasn’t finished with Nelson. He was my one link to Jeanette. I got out of the car, though not entirely sure what I was going to do to get past his brother and over-protective abuelita, never mind what I would say to him to get him to talk to me again. In that moment of hesitancy, I watched Nelson and his brother walk towards the front door and I marveled at the unspoken support emanating from the backs of one person walking next to another in silence. There was no steadying hand, no arm around the shoulder. He didn’t even hold the door for his brother. But Nelson was back with his family and that was a good thing.
I got back in my car, fired up the engine, and headed out for the long ride back to Eagle Rock. The black sedan waited for me in front of my house.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF DYING
I parked in the garage and came out the side door. Hector waited for me on the walkway. We silently made our way inside, and he waited patiently in the center of the living room while I turned on some lights and opened the windows to let in the cooling night air.
“They got another email,” he told me after I stopped buzzing around the room. I made a move to sit down, but Hector made no move at all, so I remained standing. “They want more money.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Three million.”
This time I sat down and thought it over. That was quite a jump from forty thousand dollars. “I assume the email came from Jeanette?” He nodded. “Did you see the actual email?”
“It was sent to Mr. Valenti. I heard him talking to his daughter and Jeanette’s dad.”
“What did you mean by ‘they’ wanting more money?” Hector shrugged his shoulders but I could tell he had some ideas. “The police found the Portillo boy,” I said and explained exactly how they found him, but the mention of the boy didn’t register with Hector. “Who do you think it is?”
Hector deferred to his boss.
“Mr. Valenti said if it was either of them he’d crush them.”
“Either of whom? Meredith and Jeff?”
“He told them when they came to the house.”
It was not a surprise that Valenti had suspicions about his daughter and her ex-husband. He was innately suspicious of everyone when it came to money. I wondered if he thought they were in on it together. Individually, they both had the motive and if I thought about it enough, I could imagine each attempting something like this, or trying it together.
“Sit down,” I instructed. “You’re making me nervous.” Hector shot me a look but eventually took a seat on the couch. “What do you think about this?”
“I don’t know. It’s not my business.”
“Then why did you come here to tell me about it?”
“I thought you would want to know.”
That reason made little sense. He had already pushed the limits of his relationship with Valenti when we were working together, but the act of coming to my house smashed all of those limits in one stroke. He was betraying the confidence of the family to someone whom his boss had dismissed. Valenti valued privacy above almost anything and this impropriety would have repercussions beyond Hector’s mere dismissal from the job he’d held for nearly fifty years.
“You know something that you’re not telling me.”
“I’m not lying.”
“I know you aren’t but you’re also not telling me everything. You’re concerned about something. Otherwise, you would never have come all this way in the middle of the night. What is it?”
“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.”
