“The Barnacle thinks he’s so clever,” he said, laughing. 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 came from an account that only Jeanette had access to. 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 Lincoln was locked and Valenti’s driver made no effort to do anything about it, so I settled in on the creaking leather of the backseat. As we pulled out onto Figueroa, I anxiously looked back toward 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 acknowledgment 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 toward the entrance to the 110 south.
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 that 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 up 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 a 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 and frightened of, as they threatened the realization of his museum. I imagined an oversexed 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 oversexed waif was actually a frumpy, unassuming girl of sixteen 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, his arm draped around Jeanette’s shoulder. Everything about her was embarrassed, as if 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 Lincoln left the 110 freeway and merged onto the 405. We 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 blond 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 was 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 mishmash 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.
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 ove
r 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 people displayed said a lot about them, either who they were as a person or who 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 that you knew who he was. I also saw 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 forewords 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 the path to this enviable position “creating dependency.”
There was at least $1,000 worth of improvement books here, all clearly read more than once. Sixteen 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 headfirst into grownup malaise.
I thumbed through some of the more worn, dogeared 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.”
“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.”
She was the only one finding enjoyment from this back-and-forth. I paused and 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 clamshells. 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 $45,000.”
“Forty-five 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 45K, what money were you referring to?”
“There’s a lot more money involved than a mere $45,000,” 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, most 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.
“No,” she said, chuckling, “he’s not her boyfriend.”
Meredith 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 of 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 who 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 toward 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 $100,000 bounty. Neither stepped over the threshold.
It was a man in his thirties, casually dressed in jeans and a flowing 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 as 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.
The Perpetual Summer Page 3