The Perpetual Summer

by Adam Walker Phillips

  “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 toward the heavens.

  “With light and love,” he bade me goodbye.

  “Sure thing,” I said and scrambled out of the house.

  THE WESTSIDE

  I don’t know what all the commotion is about,” Jeff Schwartzman told me as we crossed the empty reception area in his office. “I spoke to her yesterday.”

  “You did?”

  “She only calls me when she has a fight with her mom.” He paused, suddenly realizing something. “She usually stays with me when they fight.”

  “Do you know where she is now?”

  “No, she didn’t say and I didn’t think to ask her.” I watched a growing sense of unease get washed away with a sweeping hand gesture. “She’s fine,” he told himself. “She’s done this before.”

  “How many times?”

  “Too many.”

  I followed him into a modest office crammed with museum catalogues and art books. The décor was appropriately contemporary with a desk made of glass and chrome, but nothing looked particularly expensive. Conspicuously absent was any form of window with a view to remind you that you were in the expensive section of Wilshire Boulevard. It was not the office you’d expect for the director of a major art foundation.

  “Those two are always bickering,” he said, sitting behind his desk. He motioned for me to pull a chair over. As I sat down opposite him, I couldn’t help but notice the giant black-and-white photograph of a male nude looming over him. The model’s instrument, magnified multiple times over, was strategically placed off Jeff’s right shoulder. “My wife is not the easiest person to get along with.”

  “How long have you been separated?”

  “Probably a week after we got married,” he said, laughing. “Let’s just say that kind of money and lifestyle aren’t made for guys like you and me.” Apparently he missed the memo about my offshore bank accounts. “Look, I married into one of the wealthiest families in Los Angeles but I still drive a Honda,” he told me as proof of his humble desires, but it sounded like, if he had a choice, he’d be driving something much more luxurious. “You can take the kid out of Northridge but you can’t take Northridge out of the kid.”

  The kid from the Valley was an appropriately succinct description. Jeff was an unremarkable man in several ways, from his appearance in an off-the-rack collared shirt to his pedestrian personality. I tried to rationalize this image of an ordinary man sitting opposite me and the one of the fitness-obsessed heiress I had met earlier in the day. Theirs was a curious partnership, despite the fact that it may have only existed for a flash. Somewhere in that flash, however, a little girl came into this world.

  “You’re studying me like you’re trying to figure out if it’s true.”

  “What’s true, Mr. Schwartzman?”

  “All the things the old man said about me.” He tried to remain above it all but his insecurity was palpable. “Did he mention the incident in Santa Barbara?” I didn’t answer, hoping he would answer for me. “Of course he did. He never misses a chance to bring it up.”

  “What’s your side of it?”

  “Let me ask you, is it theft to steal from someone who stole from you first?”

  “Maybe not,” I replied.

  He rambled through a convoluted story about a crooked art dealer and unpaid wages and some minor Impressionist watercolor he’d borrowed as collateral until he got the money owed him. After the fourth time he told me that he was never officially charged with any crime, I decided to put his mind at ease.

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” I told him.

  “Right? Tell that to the old man. You know on my promotion to director, he introduced me as a ‘former art thief’ who has come a long way. He’s a piece of work,” he said with a laugh, suddenly more at ease with me, but more importantly with my standing as a member of the commoners. “It’s a Mapplethorpe,” he told me.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “The giant naked man behind me,” he said thumbing at the photograph. “I apologize. It’s hard not to get distracted by it.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I don’t know anything about art,” I told him.

  “It’s junk,” he scoffed. Sensing my confusion on why it was hanging in his office if he had such a low opinion of it, he explained, “Although I am director of the foundation, the old man retains the final say on which pieces go where. This is his idea of a joke. Hilarious, isn’t it?” I gave him a look of shared commiseration. “When I courted the local archdiocese in the fight against the museum, he had an icon of Christ smeared in human feces installed in the conference room where we met. Try explaining that to a Cardinal.”

  He was a broken man who didn’t want to admit it; someone who salved his wounds by taking on an air of aloofness to show how little the old man’s needling bothered him. He heroically played the part of the soldier in the old movies who tells his buddy he’s fine even though everyone around him knows the gut shot is fatal.

  “I’ll tell you a good one,” he said, chuckling. “When it came time for my fortieth birthday, he gave me a thick envelope, letter-sized. In it was a copy of his will.” He looked to me for some kind of reaction but got none. “It was his way of telling me that I wasn’t in it. What a piece of work, right?” We shared a good laugh. Or, he laughed and I watched him.

  “About your daughter,” I reminded him.

  Again he waved me off and let the laughter draw out to its unnatural conclusion.

  “I’ll call her this evening and tell her to come home,” he said, as if it was as easy as a ten-second phone call.

  “Mr. Valenti believes this could be something serious—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “—enough that he has hired me to find her.”

  “Look, I don’t judge you,” he told me magnanimously. “I appreciate it,” I said, although suddenly the tone was no longer among equals.

  “You have a living to earn and I don’t begrudge it. Heck, I’ll even help you get your money. But you don’t know the old man. This isn’t about my daughter.”

  “What is it about, then?”

  “What it’s always about—getting what he wants.” Jeff was starting to look a little off-balanced. “He wants this museum,” he said with a shrug. “He’ll do anything to get it. You can’t put anything past him.”

  The whole thing seemed wildly implausible. But then again this was a wildly implausible family. There was a missing teenager, a worried grandfather with potentially ulterior motives for having her found, and two parents who couldn’t be bothered to care.

  “Is your daughter close to her grandfather?”

  “He’s a very persuasive man,” he answered.

  I got more details from Jeff about his daughter’s friends than I got from her mother. I asked him to call me as soon as he heard from Jeanette and I promised to do the same if I learned anything new. He walked me out of the office and felt enough like we were equals to put his arm around me.

  “Tell me something,” he said, pausing by the receptionist’s desk. “Did he use my name when you spoke?”

  “Who? Mr. Valenti?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t really remember, Mr. Schwartzman.”

  “You don’t have to be polite. I know he called me ‘The Barnacle.’ It’s okay, I like it,” he reassured. “It’s rather appropriate.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked casually.
r />   “Because it’ll take dynamite to get me off this ship,” he said defiantly.

  Hector was waiting in the downstairs lobby and opened the door for me as I approached. I paused to let a young Asian man coming in the opposite direction go first. Just as the man crossed the threshold I saw Hector flick the door just enough to close the gap between the door and the jam. The move knocked the man off balance, and he stumbled into the lobby.

  “Asshole.” He sneered at an emotionless Hector.

  I looked at Hector, still holding the door open for me, but decided to exit through the other bank.

  We stopped at a burger place on Pico not far from Jeff’s office. We ordered from separate lines and ate at separate tables. He never looked in my direction, but I watched him.

  He consumed his meal with the methodical approach of someone who ate for nourishment, not for pleasure. On the surface, he gave off the image of an old man oblivious to all the things going on around him. A screaming baby to his right got not so much as a glance. A homeless man asking for money received even less attention. He ate his entire meal with a dab of mayonnaise on his mustache, a white dot on a black canvas that I could see from a good twenty feet away. Yet all the while I felt like he was watching everything in great detail.

  He saw her before I did.

  Morgan McIlroy turned her nose up at the modest establishment. She kept both her arms in tight to her body as if letting them wander would expose them to unknown amounts of germs. I looked past her to the parking lot and saw the Mercedes and two girlfriends waiting for her. They wanted no part of the burger place.

  Hector led her over to my table and wordlessly asked her to sit. I was worried that our meeting would put her on edge—so worried that I had Jeff call her parents first to provide the introduction. But my concern was unwarranted, because Morgan wasn’t bothered in the least. There was an undeserved confidence in the way she casually sat with an adult stranger. She leaned back in the booth and pulled one leg up so her knee could serve as a place to rest her chin. She was around Jeanette’s age, maybe a little older, but they couldn’t have been more different. She was the oversexed waif I had initially imagined Valenti’s granddaughter to be.

  “Thanks for meeting with me,” I began.

  “Sure, but I don’t think I can help,” she replied. She studied the remains of my half-eaten meal with her lip slightly curled. “I mean, we’re not like friends or anything.”

  “Well, we’re just trying to find out as much information as we can. How long have you known her?”

  “Maybe five years. Our parents are friends,” she added.

  Morgan was confirming my suspicions that Jeanette was a lonely kid whose interactions with others came mainly through her family.

  “Do you know a boy named Nelson something?”

  “Portillo? Yeah, he goes to my school.” Then she added, “They give scholarships to families with challenging economic means.”

  It was a talking point straight out of the school’s PR campaign, but despite the altruistic core of the words in the sentence there was still an air of snobbery by the person delivering it.

  “So Jeanette and Nelson are friends?”

  “Yeah, they’re close.”

  “Are they dating?” I probed.

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you know his number?”

  Morgan tapped away on her phone and tracked down his cell. I copied the number down.

  “What about a home address?” I asked.

  “One of my friends is in art class with him,” she explained. “She probably has it,” and before she finished the sentence she was sending a text asking for the address. “Jeanette did text me recently,” she said almost like an afterthought.

  “She did? When?”

  “I don’t know. About three weeks ago.” Morgan again eyed my fries but this time she started eating them. She scowled at the first bite but that didn’t stop her from motoring through the rest of them. “She asked for money,” said the girl with a mouthful of food.

  “Do you still have the text?”

  “Yeah.” She began scrolling through her old texts. “It was for some sick amount of money, like $30,000 or something.” She spent the next five minutes looking for it and handed her phone over to show me.

  It was a long text that rambled through a half-apology and then a request for money for something she couldn’t say. The amount requested was the same she asked of Valenti by email. I noted the date and time but my memory told me it was shortly after the same request went to her grandfather. There was an address listed where Morgan was to bring the money. I wrote that down and heard Morgan snicker.

  “It’d be easier if I just forwarded the text to you.”

  “I’m the old-fashioned kind,” I said. I read through the text a few more times but didn’t glean anything more. “It doesn’t look like you responded.”

  “I just ignored it. Too weird.”

  “Did you ever talk to her about it?”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen her since then,” she answered.

  “Was this normal to you? I mean, had she ever asked you for money before?”

  “We never really talked much or hung out.”

  “Did you ever talk to each other?” I probed.

  “Maybe at a Christmas party at my parents’ house,” she said, then added, “She’s just weird.”

  “We’re all weird.”

  “Not like her. She’s sort of a loner.”

  There was sympathy in her words, a sadness that another human being could be so alone. And there was fear that something like that could happen to her. I started to get a better picture of the girl I was looking for and even of the one in front of me. The latter was full of bluster that projected a confident maturity, but underneath she was very much the opposite. Her phone buzzed and she reflexively picked it up. It was her friend replying with Nelson’s address.

  “Do you want to write it down?” she smirked.

  “Text it to me,” I told her.

  Before we parted, I asked that she keep our conversation in confidence, but I knew full well that wasn’t going to happen. A flurry of gossip among the kids might actually help flush out some more information and it even might help flush out Jeanette herself.

  Morgan was back to her casual, confident self, and I was grateful for it. When I wished her goodbye she bounced to her feet and flashed me a peace sign.

  “With light and love,” she chirped.

  The house was a mustard-colored box with stucco that was bleached near-white in spots where the sun pounded it relentlessly. The treeless front yard was covered in a layer of brittle crabgrass like hay spread out for a pony-ride stable. An overpowering smell of cat urine baking in the sun tickled the area high up in the nose.

  The screen door was intact but the screen was not. I reached through it to knock on the windowless door. A few moments passed before an abuelita in a housecoat shuffled to the doorway.

  “Hi, we’re looking for Nelson,” I said in a slow and deliberate manner, but the old woman stared blankly back at me. “Nelson Portillo? Is he home?”

  I got no response and looked to Hector to provide some assistance. Instead, he reached past the abuelita and pushed the front door open wider and simultaneously stepped into the house.

  “Whoa, what are you doing?” I said.

  This woke up the abuelita and she rattled off a string of invectives at Hector but they fell on deaf ears. I saw movement in the dark area toward the back of the house. Hector saw it too and ran in that direction. There was more shouting inside and then a flash of light of a rear door being opened and the bright sun pouring in.

  I stepped off the stoop and ran to the side of the house where a narrow walkway cut through the space between Nelson’s house and the neighbor’s. I crossed the small backyard, jumped a rusted chain-link fence, and stumbled into the back alley. To the right was a long, empty stretch. To the left was a shorter bit that led to a cross street. I ran in that
direction.

  Hector stood in the middle of the intersection, his arms hanging by his sides but enough away from his body to be in a pose of provocation. Faced off with him was a young Latino whose age was indeterminate because of his shaved head and tattoos. The young man reached into the pocket of his calf-length shorts and pulled out a knife. He swirled the tip in Hector’s direction. The blade glinted brilliantly in the afternoon sun.

  I moved a few paces toward them.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I called to Hector. “It’s not worth it.”

  The man facing off with Hector glanced in my direction and then back to his elder combatant.

  “Listen to the guero, old man,” he smirked.

  Hector didn’t heed his advice. He calmly removed his jacket, folded it once over and laid it on the pavement. When he stood back up, he had a knife of his own. Unlike his foe, Hector held the knife in a fist with the blade pointed down. It felt more menacing.

  The closest I had ever been to a knife fight was my high school production of West Side Story when I endured two-plus hours of torturous singing because of a crush I had on the girl who played Maria. There was nothing poetic about this back-alley version. There were no hunched-over torsos, no choreographed circling. The younger man puffed out his chest and rolled up onto the balls of his feet in this odd bouncy posture. He feinted toward Hector’s shoulder but was surprised, as was I, by the lack of a response from the old man. Hector stood motionless. He somehow knew there was no intention to harm behind the move. What was an attempt to frighten succeeded only in scaring the intimidator.

  Hector took a purposeful step forward when a Honda held together by Bondo and duct tape came to a rapid stop on the far corner. Two young Latinos emerged, leaving both front doors open. They instinctively looped around Hector in a sort of pincer move that would have made Rommel proud. The three of them looked at Hector, and then to me, and then calculated their odds. I could see them collectively come to a satisfying conclusion—three against one, fair fight.

  But Hector didn’t act like the underdog. If anything, he was emboldened by the long odds. He made the first move, and all three men took a synchronized step back. Art sometimes does imitate life. Hector singled out the original fighter and squared off with him. His first step was met with a move that stopped him cold. The young man lifted his XXL white T-shirt and revealed a gun tucked into the elastic waistband of his basketball shorts. The butt of the gun was like an ink stain on his stomach.