Текст книги "The Eternal Summer"
Автор книги: Paul MacDonald
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
ONE CONDITION
There comes a point in life when people simply stop evolving. They settle on the haircut they will get for the rest of their lives, the wardrobe that will never get updated, the speech that defies the passing eras. The Coverdale Club reached that point forty years ago.
The paneled dining room was empty except for a few dusty old-timers enjoying the most popular appetizer in the house – double rye Manhattans. Audubon and fox hunting prints decorated the walls and harkened a simple, more bucolic life full of nature and slaughter. A tuxedoed waiter, clutching a leather-bound menu, padded across the burgundy carpet but he needn’t have gone through the trouble as I could have guessed the menu’s contents without looking – salad of iceberg lettuce wedges and bleu cheese dressing, London Broil, potato dauphine, and thick asparagus with hollandaise, all washed down with a ruby claret.
“Good afternoon,” the elderly waiter intoned. “May I inquire whose guest you are gracing us as today?”
He apparently was familiar with the entire member roster to know that I didn’t belong to the club, although that feat wasn’t too impressive since I was the only person under sixty in the entire place. He watched me make one last scan of the dining room.
“Are you meeting a member?” asked the voice with a growing sense of annoyance.
“Yes,” I answered. “Carl Valenti.”
The osteoporosis posture suddenly became a little straighter and the voice became a little more helpful. For a name that normally drew my ire, this time it actually felt good to say it. The man eagerly led me to a small elevator with another vestige of the past, a human operator. The directory called out the gymnasium, a lyceum for guest speakers, and then “residences” at the top which was code for rooms to entertain young women on the make. They also served as actual residences when the young woman gets you kicked out of your mansion in San Marino. We got off at the floor with the gym.
I was led into a room lined with mahogany lockers and covered in hunter green carpet that smelled of laudanum and foot powder. The room was full of big, white bellies in towels and older black men who waited on them. It echoed an unpleasant “yes’um” era when blacks served as the backbone of the service industry in Los Angeles.
I followed the attendant into one of the saunas hidden behind a groaning, wooden door. Valenti was the only occupant. He sat hunched forward on one of the benches. He had old man skin, like an over-stretched sweater, with rivulets of sweat running through the folds. The door thudded shut as the attendant left us alone.
“Do you want to talk outside?” I asked. I was already sweating and clearly not dressed for the occasion.
“It’s quieter in here,” he answered.
“Okay,” I said. “How should we start?”
“You tell me. You’re the investigator.”
The man clearly never missed an opportunity to needle.
“No, I’m not an investigator,” I said, loosening the collar of my shirt. “But maybe that’s where we should start. Tell me why you didn’t hire a real one.”
“I’ve worked with private investigators in the past. They are nothing more than blackmailers in disguise. I can’t invite that sort of temptation into this.”
“What would they be tempted with, Mr. Valenti?”
He didn’t like that question.
“Every family has its unseemly side. Mine is no different. I’d rather not have that be exploited.”
“Tell me about your granddaughter.”
“There’s nothing unseemly about her,” he snapped.
“I didn’t ask for the dirt on her,” I corrected, though now it made me think I should have. “I was just asking for some general information.”
Valenti spent the next five minutes describing his only grandchild. Jeanette was the daughter of Meredith Schwartzman, his only child through a second marriage. The girl lived with her mother who was permanently separated from her husband. He talked about the missing girl like a proud grandfather but he relayed the information with a reporter’s distance. The words matched but the tone didn’t.
I did a stint in recruiting before my current role with the firm. There I developed an invaluable skill called the Bullshit Detector. Over the last two decades, résumés had become so bloated with fluff and jargon that it became nearly impossible to discern what someone actually did in their past roles.
“Facilitated discussions among teams of senior managers…”
“Liaison for strategic external clients…”
“Workflow oversight of core content deliverables…”
Like those red lens glasses that kids use to find the secret word, the Bullshit Detector allowed you to see through the spin and get to the heart of what someone did.
“Scheduled meetings.”
“Answered phones.”
“Did nothing.”
There was so much nonsense coming out of Valenti’s mouth that I had to shut off the detector for fear of it overheating. My head swirled in the maddening array of evasive answers and half-truths. Or it could have been the fact that the room was a hundred and eighty degrees and I was wearing wool. Thankfully the attendant came in and poured another ladle of water on the hot stones.
“Your granddaughter is fourteen years old. Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked.
“There was a time when you could own the police,” he lamented, “but now you have to own the union to own the police and that is too expensive a proposition. They have an insatiable appetite. I don’t want the publicity that comes with an official investigation.”
“It’s your granddaughter,” I said flatly.
Valenti didn’t appreciate the recrimination in that statement.
“I know it means nothing to you but that museum means a lot to me.” It was the first thing he said that I actually believed. “The building won’t go up without a fight. There are a lot of people who would like to see me fail. Do you know about the ballot initiative?”
I remembered reading about a local proposition sponsored by the offspring of one of Chinatown’s scions. It was an innocuous-sounding change to a certain cultural heritage provision which was in reality a thinly-disguised maneuver to block the construction of Valenti’s art museum. It was a bit of a local scandal because one of the sponsors of the proposition was none other than the art foundation that Valenti founded and would use to populate the museum itself. Adding to the controversy was the fact that the person leading the charge was the head of the foundation, Valenti’s own estranged son-in-law.
“The Barnacle thinks he’s so clever,” he laughed. I assumed he was referring to his former kin. “He still hasn’t learned who he is dealing with.”
“Is your granddaughter’s disappearance somehow connected to the museum?” I wanted to bring us back to the issue at hand.
“That’s why I am potentially paying you,” he shot back. “To find out.” I let him calm down a minute by remaining quiet. He busied himself with the coals and readjusted the plank that kept him from burning his ass on the bench. “There’s one other thing. There was a note.”
“What kind of note?” I asked.
“An email asking for money.” He sounded ashamed.
“From your granddaughter?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“It just asked for money.”
“What’d you do?”
“What do you think I did?” he asked back. “I paid it.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” he concluded.
“How do you know it was legitimate?”
“It was legitimate.”
“How can you be sure it wasn’t someone posing as your granddaughter?”
“The email was sent to an account that only Jeanette has the address for. I set it up just for her.”
“I’d like to see the email.”
“I have a copy for you downstairs in the car. There is a full packet there for you to look through.” I was curious why he didn’t bother to bring it up. “My driver will give you full access to my properties to do whatever you need to do.”
“Your driver? I don’t understand.”
“Hector will take you wherever you need to go.”
“I have a car, Mr. Valenti.”
“Hector is a condition of the offer,” he stated firmly.
“I wasn’t aware I needed a chaperone.”
“It’s not up for negotiation.”
***
The front door of the town car was locked and Valenti’s driver made no effort to do anything about it so I settled in upon the creaking leather in the back seat. As we pulled out onto Figueroa, I anxiously looked back towards the Club and wondered what would become of my car sitting in the garage down below.
“I’m Chuck,” I said to the back of the shiny black head.
I got no response.
“You’re Hector, right?”
There was no acknowledgement on his end.
“Don’t worry, I’m not much of a conversationalist either,” I told him and asked that he take me to the girl’s home. At least I knew he was listening to me because we banked three lanes over towards the entrance to the 110.
I wanted to talk to the girl’s family and perhaps look around her house for some insights into why she left. What exactly I was going to look for when I got there was a mystery but it felt like the correct thing to do. Sitting on the seat next to me was the folder Valenti referenced which contained various bits of information, including the email Valenti received from his granddaughter:
Need $45,000. Don’t ask why.
Am in trouble. —J
I had already worked an unflattering image of Jeanette in my head, and this email confirmed it. I pictured a wild young girl, coming into her own with more money than most would see in their lifetime, living an entitled life of private schools in Beverly Hills and vacation homes that followed the seasons. The ambiguous way Valenti described her led me to believe she had already amassed a cemetery’s worth of skeletons that he was both ashamed of and frightened of, as they threatened the realization of his museum. I imagined an over-sexed waif landing herself in some dire financial situation that was both inevitable and doomed to be repeated because of the bottomless reserve of funds always there to bail her out. In a very short while I came to resent this little brat. That is, until I came upon her photo.
The over-sexed waif was actually a frumpy, unassuming girl of fourteen who looked painfully uncomfortable in her own skin. It was a simple photograph overlooking the ocean – most likely Hawaii – with a smiling and casually-dressed Valenti with his arm draped around Jeannette’s shoulder. Everything about her was embarrassed, like the camera lens was the glare of a thousand suns whose sole purpose was to illuminate all of her faults. She angled her body in a way to spare it the uncompromising reality of the photograph. She tucked in her chin and offered up a sideways half-smile to hide its imperfections. With one leg bent behind her, she appeared to be nervously grinding her toes into the sand and would have crawled into the indentation in the earth if she could.
The town car merged onto the 405 and headed north a short way, exiting before we hit the pass. We turned off the main drag and started weaving our way up into the residential area of Brentwood. The houses here weren’t audacious but they came at audacious prices. Many were colonial revivals or renovated ranches. We stopped in front of a contemporary structure made of burnished steel, thick panes of glass, and strategically-placed planks of blonde wood. The yard was small and immaculate. Not a single stray leaf blotted the walkway up to the front door.
Hector silently led the way to the entrance. He rang the doorbell and no more than five seconds passed before he took out a ring of keys and inserted one into the lock.
“What are you doing?” I asked, dismayed that he felt it in his right to open the door to someone else’s home.
“You wanted to see the girl’s room,” he explained.
“Yes, but we can’t just barge into a stranger’s house without their knowing.”
“This is Mr. Valenti’s house,” he corrected. “His daughter lives here.” The nuance of his answer was telling. I’d watched enough British television series to know that the servants often spoke the language of their bosses.
I trailed him into the foyer. It was an open-concept room with a bank of windows that looked out over the lower half of one of the many canyons in the neighborhood. The furniture looked expensive and uncomfortable. To the left were the kitchen and public areas. To the right looked to be the bedrooms.
“You want to see her room?” he asked and led me that way before waiting for a reply.
“Are you sure this is okay to be snooping around?” I called after him, but he ignored me.
I followed Hector down a hallway lined with artwork but no personal photographs. The other wall was all glass and gave the illusion that you were outside. Several yards away was a stationary lap pool. Somewhere in the white froth was a swimmer beating futilely against a jet-propelled current.
Hector stood outside a door to one of the rooms and gestured inside. Like the guide who brings you to the altar of the holy temple, he was willing to point it out but he was going to let me desecrate it all by myself. I stood outside the room and fought off the feelings of creepiness that came with a middle-aged man skulking around a young teen’s bedroom.
A mish-mash of pastel purples and greens and frilly pillows, it was smaller than I would have imagined the daughter of the daughter of a billionaire would have. I gingerly stepped into the room and did a quick scan. By the time my eyes got back to the doorway, Hector had disappeared. I wanted to join him.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. A gnawing regret at having taken the assignment grew into a deeper regret that I was fooling with someone’s life. Maybe this was all just a troubled girl going through a difficult stage, but it very well could have been something more serious, and I was playing games purely out of boredom. One hour into the job, I was already ready to quit.
A slippery figure in white slid by the door. Seconds later it backed up and paused in the entrance to study the strange man in the young girl’s bedroom.
“And you are?” it asked.
The figure was a towel-clad woman with the smoothest, unblemished, most perfectly-tanned legs. Her skin had the patina of brass. She was overly-toned, bordering on overly-muscular. Wednesdays must have been her calf workout days at the gym because the slightest shift on her feet accentuated yet another muscle in the lower half of her legs that I didn’t know existed. She crossed her arms over her chest and gazed at me with pale green eyes. A quizzically arched eyebrow left no line on her engineered forehead.
“I was hired to find a missing girl,” I answered.
That seemed to amuse her.
“Give me a minute, would you?” she smiled and disappeared down the hall.
While I waited I looked over the room and a shelf piled high with books caught my attention. I always believed the books someone displayed said a lot about them, either in whom they were as a person or in whom they wanted you to believe they were. Jeanette’s shelf had your typical smattering of classics with wrinkle-free spines – no one actually read Dostoyevsky but having him on your shelf at minimum proved you knew who he was. There were also an inordinate number of well-handled books with titles that contained some combination of the words “power,” “winning,” and “transformation.” I pulled a few down to inspect the covers. They all followed a familiar formula – an incredibly catchy title with a declarative statement that boldly predicted the simple path to wealth, success, love, or any number of the elusive targets we spend lifetimes chasing.
All the books contained forwards from other self-help authors – the industry was apparently very welcoming to newcomers. It was as if they all understood that a self-help customer is a lifelong customer and that there were enough dollars to feed many mouths. Nothing in their books was actually going to solve whatever problem the person had. But the desire to fix ourselves is an insatiable want and the only answer is more books. Marketers call this enviable position, “creating dependency.”
There was at least a thousand dollars’ worth of improvement books here, all clearly read more than once. Fourteen years old seemed much too young for someone to be overwhelmed with the inevitable existential crisis of adulthood. I felt a pang of sadness at the idea that this girl had somehow skipped the trite saga of a teenage girl and jumped head-first into grown-up malaise.
I thumbed through a few of the more worn, dog-eared copies. Entire passages were called out in yellow highlighter. Particular sections were belt-and-suspendered with ink underlines. I read a few of the sections and they were remarkable in how assured the writing was in describing nonsensical concepts. My eye caught a slip of paper protruding from the back. I flipped forward and removed a carefully-folded printout of what appeared to be an old newspaper story. I got no further than the date at the top – June 1961 – when I heard footsteps approaching. I quickly shoved the paper into my pocket and replaced the book on the shelf.
The woman reappeared in a tennis outfit that was more revealing than the towel. She had taken the time to partly blow-dry her hair, which was now parted with the precision of a laser level. A trace amount of makeup had been applied, as well as a delicate citrusy perfume. She must have read the study about how the smell of grapefruit made people think you were five years younger than your actual age.
“I’m Meredith Valenti,” she introduced herself with a hand extended, “the missing girl’s mother.” There was something snide in the way she said the second part.
“Chuck Restic.”
“Dad hates private investigators,” she announced and sat down on the edge of the twin bed. “Do you work for the firm?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You’re a real private investigator?”
“Define ‘real’.”
“Have you ever made a dollar doing that kind of work?”
“No.” I got the look reserved for deviled eggs left out too long at the party. “Your father asked me to help locate her.”
“Of course he did. Dad always gets serious when money is involved,” she added mysteriously.
“Money doesn’t seem to be much of a concern,” I informed her. After all, I was being paid double the amount of money that was asked for by the girl I was trying to find.
“You don’t know Dad.”
Her lack of a pronoun when describing her father was curious. There was something impersonal about it, like she was describing an inanimate object and not the human who shared her blood.
“Has your daughter ever done this before?”
“Done what?”
“Go missing for a period of time.”
“Who said she was missing?” she asked.
“You did, when you introduced yourself.”
“I was parroting you.”
“So you know where she is?” I asked, suddenly confused.
“I didn’t say that.”
“How long has she been gone?” I tried again.
“I don’t know, almost a week.”
“When did you last speak to her?”
“I can’t remember the exact date. Sometime last weekend.”
“Has she tried to make any contact since then?”
“Not that I know of.”
Her answers were terse and tinged with bemusement, but she was the only one finding enjoyment out of it. I took a moment to study her more closely. She was approaching the half-century mark and fighting it every step of the way. I’d seen this in others – both men and women – who become obsessed with looking better with each passing year in some manic pursuit of a simple phrase: She looks good for her age.
Meredith had seemingly reached a point where fitness had taken over her life – a strict regimen of juicing and enemas and twelve hours of Pilates. Yet nothing is as inevitable as the onslaught of age. For every perfectly-toned leg there is a lack of that youthful fat that just can’t be replicated in the gym. The response is more toning, even less fat, more muscle, and ultimately two legs with knees resembling giant clam shells. I stared at one of those knees and the leg coquettishly rocking on it.
“Pardon me for being so forward, but you are acting very casual for someone whose teenage daughter has been missing for nearly a week.”
“You don’t know me,” she said icily, “or my family.”
“No, I don’t know you,” I admitted. “But I am trying to locate your daughter and finding out as much information as possible would help me. Has your daughter ever asked for money before?”
“What do you mean?”
“She sent your father an email asking for forty thousand dollars.”
“Forty thousand dollars?” This was new information to her. “Dad paid it?” she asked incredulously.
I told her he had. She got a lot of enjoyment out of that, and the frost that had descended on our conversation started to melt. She went back to bouncing her leg on her knee.
“What did you mean earlier when you said your father gets serious when money is involved? If you didn’t know about the 40K, what money were you referring to?”
“There’s a lot more money involved than some forty thousand dollars,” she said dreamily. She seemed to get lost in some other thought. I wanted to bring her back to the present.
“Does your daughter keep a diary?”
“Yes, she keeps it next to her favorite locket and dreamy publicity stills of her matinee idols.” She couldn’t resist. But as if remembering our recent truce, she wiped the smirk from her lips and took a more conciliatory tone. “You don’t have kids, do you?”
When I admitted as much she went on to explain how children didn’t keep diaries anymore when they could share all of their darkest, insignificant thoughts on the internet for everyone to read.
“Where does she keep her computer?”
“If it was here it’d be on her nightstand.”
It wasn’t.
“And her phone?”
“In her back pocket.”
I glanced at the floor by the nightstand. There was a power strip and two empty slots that I assumed were for her chargers. That indicated some element of planning.
“Do you have the names of her friends I could talk to?”
She answered with the names of her friends, not her daughter’s.
“Oh, and the Mexican boy,” she added. “Nelson something.”
“Is that her boyfriend?” I asked.
“She’s not her boyfriend,” she chuckled. She riffled through the desk drawer and pulled out a photo of Jeanette and a young, dark-skinned boy with foppish hair and chubby cheeks. At least in this photo Jeanette was smiling.
“Can I keep this?” I asked and got a nod for approval. “Is it possible to speak to your husband?”
“Ex-husband,” she corrected. “You can speak to him any time you want.”
“Anyone else in the house that might have some information that would be useful?”
“Are you asking if there is another man?”
“Actually, I was thinking of a housekeeper.”
The frost returned to the room. She bounced to her feet and made for the door. “I have an appointment. Please show yourself out when you are finished.”
I pawed around the room a bit more but gave up after not finding anything of much value. I went back down the hall towards the foyer. Hector wasn’t there. He was either in the bathroom or perhaps helping himself to whatever was in the fridge.
I heard the key rattle in the door behind me. I first assumed it was Hector. Then, I thought of Jeanette and the fortune of being here when she returned home. I eagerly awaited her and the hundred thousand dollar bounty. Neither stepped through the threshold.
It was a man in his thirties, casually dressed in jeans and a flowy shirt open to the chest in order to showcase ten to twenty straggling hairs. He wore an unkempt Van Dyke beard and John Lennon frames. He was equally comfortable in the Schwartzman residence as he was in my personal space.
“Welcome,” he breathed into my face, “it’s good to see you.”
“You too,” I said, leaning back for a more comfortable distance between us. His breath was slightly sour, like fermented black bread.
“Meredith has spoken a lot about you.”
“That’s nice of her,” although I didn’t know how since I had just met her. “All good things, I hope.”
“Yes, wonderful things.” He had the penetrating stare of a cannibal. I detected an accent but couldn’t place it. “We need to set aside some time for just you and me, yes?”
“If you think it’s worth it,” I replied only because I had no idea what he was talking about. He stared at me far longer than the three seconds allotted for strangers to lock eyes. I badly wanted to crawl out from under his gaze.
“There’s something here,” he said and pointed to his heart. “Something unique and…powerful. It just needs to be released.” I couldn’t tell if the power was in his heart or mine. I nodded along with him. “I apologize but I have another session,” he said with regret. The calls of a prior commitment broke his fixation on me. His body immediately relaxed and he thankfully took a step back. “But we need time to share.”
“I look forward to it,” I lied.
He looked very pleased. I anticipated the phase: “My work is done here.” Instead I got St. Francis of Assisi with both palms opened towards the heavens.
“With light and love,” he bade me goodbye.
“Sure thing,” I said and scrambled out of the house.
