I took a step back. Hector didn’t move an inch. He stared impassively at the threat. The young man with the gun decided Hector wasn’t going to charge him and seemed to relax a bit. He slowly backed up toward the car and his friends moved with him. They all got in and sped off.
“What the hell was that?” I shouted as Hector approached, but he didn’t stop to answer. I reached out and grabbed his arm. The old man shot me a look that instantly eased my grip.
“I told him when we meet again I was going to kill him.”
“Who?”
Hector thumbed in the direction of the aborted knife fight.
“The boy who took Mr. Valenti’s money.”
THE GREAT SOCKEYE RUN
First thing Monday morning I called in my assistant, Ms. Terry. She was a 300-pound woman with a hint of an Okie accent that went back two generations. She was full of old-timey phrases that somehow didn’t grate on me, most likely because she had the purest heart of anyone I had ever met. I held onto her for a decade despite many efforts to move her somewhere else. In the corporate world, people covet assistants like they covet neighbor’s wives.
“Yes, Mr. Restic?” she sang. She insisted on using formal titles despite the fact that we told her not to, and so we added the HR-correct “Ms.” before her first name, which pleased her.
“Can you dig up the name of the private investigator we use for background checks on job candidates?”
“Of course,” she replied, but I detected a slight hesitation. For the average associate, we employed a standard online service that combed through arrest records and publicly available financial data. But for certain senior roles we needed to look deeper into people’s lives. The public record did not always tell the full story; money and a good lawyer can get a lot of stuff expunged from the book of record. And what’s readily available doesn’t uncover what we called “soft issues.” Mistresses were concerning but not as concerning as multiple divorces. The firm didn’t mind people of low morals but it couldn’t expose itself to individuals whose poor judgment would cost them gobs of money. Another big red flag was anyone who initiated a lawsuit. If they did it in the past, who was to say they wouldn’t do it to us?
My assistant knew we weren’t currently searching for a candidate at this level but she was too polite to openly question me on it. She returned a moment later with the contact info for Frank “Badger” Freeley.
It was a self-appointed nickname, but I didn’t begrudge him it because it was all part of his brand, to which he remained true. He handled all of our big assignments and he did marvelous work. Most often he’d uncover details that even the candidates had forgotten. I had never met the man in person. All of my interactions with Badger were over the phone, which only added to his mystery.
“There he is!” shouted the voice on the other end of the line. That was Badger’s catchphrase, though it didn’t necessarily mean he knew who the “he” actually was. It was something he said to everyone.
“Badger,” I shouted back, “it’s Chuck Restic.”
“What do you got for me?”
There was little time for pleasantries with this guy.
“I got a unique one,” I told him and then lowered my voice. “But it’s not for the company. It’s for me.”
“Give me the name.”
The seriousness in his voice far exceeded whatever assignment I was about to give him. He brought everything to the level of an attempt on the President’s life. I loved this guy for it even if it was a put-on. I gave him the name of Valenti’s driver.
“Hector Hermosillo.”
Badger took down the details I had on the man. I left out, however, the incident with the knives. Badger taught me that part—you want to discover facts but you don’t want a filtered set of facts to skew the search for more.
I was anxious to see what he could dig up. Hector was an enigma in this affair of the girl’s disappearance. He had an uncommonly intimate relationship with Valenti and the family. He also was not someone you imagined a billionaire would use as his personal driver. The incident with the knife made me think he had other skills to offer.
Hector told me he was the one who delivered the money that Jeanette asked for, but she wasn’t the one who picked it up. The young man with the knife was the only person at the meeting point. It was there that Hector handed over the money but with a warning that if he saw him again he would kill him. I had to give Hector some credit for being true to his word. I believed he might have killed that boy if the gun hadn’t appeared.
“I’m putting this at the top of my list,” Badger announced.
“You don’t have to—”
“It’s at the top of the list,” he stated firmly, “because it needs to be.”
“Okay.” I smiled. His entire list was filled with number-one priorities. “I appreciate it.”
“You’ll be hearing from me soon,” and he hung up.
With Badger off on his assignment, I turned my attention to the paper I’d found in one of the self-help books in Jeanette’s room. It was a photocopy of an old newspaper article from 1961, most likely from its society pages. It was a few-paragraphs story about the divorce of Carl Valenti of Carson and his wife, Sheila Valenti, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Hawks, also of Carson. They had been married for eight years. It mentioned Valenti’s development company, the same one that some years later he would grow into the premier homebuilder in Orange County. It made no mention of children.
I spent the better part of my day playing detective on the internet trying to answer why Jeanette would be so interested in her grandfather’s first marriage. That meant skipping out on two touch bases and on a status meeting with my co-manager, Paul. I didn’t regret the latter. It spared me from having to endure hearing about yet another solution to the obesity epidemic.
It was fairly easy to track what happened to Valenti after the divorce. He remarried within a year to a younger woman, also from Orange County. They had one child, a little girl they named Meredith. The new Valenti couple became a fixture of the society scene in Southern California and remained so for three decades. Their names were attached to a full book of charitable organizations, saving everything from the South Bay to rescued greyhounds. The second Mrs. Carl Valenti died peacefully in her sleep in 2000 from complications of pneumonia.
Finding out what happened to his first wife, Sheila, proved a challenge. She and Valenti apparently met at Cal State Fullerton. She was Carl’s senior by several years. They married one year after they first met.
Sheila came from an established family in Orange County. There were several mentions of her father and his small manufacturing business in industry publications and business journals. He served on the town council for three terms in the city of Fullerton and was a senior officer in the local Lions Club. Her mother was a prominent figure in the Pioneer Society, a sort of D.A.R. for Californians. All these details portrayed a very comfortable, upper-middle-class life. But there the details fell off. The chroniclers of society life in Los Angeles eradicated Sheila post-divorce.
One thing I found noticeably absent was any mention of Fullerton on the long list of nonprofits and charities with which Valenti was involved. There were at least half a dozen educational foundations and universities that benefited from his largesse. But not Fullerton. An interview with him on his business career made one mention of dropping out of school in his freshman year to pursue a start-up business venture. Sheila was his senior by several years. Perhaps she had completed her degree.
I checked several alumni news publications and eventually found a handful of Fullerton graduates named Sheila. More digging and photo comparisons led me to a Sheila Lansing of Pacoima. Some ten years after her divorce from Valenti, she married Fred Lansing, insurance salesman from Sun Valley. The public narrative for the Lansings was four decades of quiet existence—a fund drive for the local church, a fender bender at the intersection of Alto and Briar, second prize in a chili contest. Fred died in 1998.
They had no children.
Sheila’s address on Fountain Street in Pacoima hadn’t changed in forty years. I decided to make the drive out there to talk to her. I called Hector and told him to meet me in front of my building.
“I’m here,” he told me.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I moved to the window and pressed my forehead against the pane. Fifty floors down I could see a black sedan parked in the red zone and the driver standing by the passenger door. “Walk to the front of the car.” The figure down below did as I asked. I wondered how long he had been out there. I didn’t like the idea of having a driver and really didn’t like the feeling that I was being watched. “Okay, I’ll come down.”
“He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious,” intoned a voice behind me. I slowly turned around to see a smiling Pat Faber sitting on the counter in my office.
“Hey, Pat,” I spoke casually. “What brings you here?”
I wasn’t sure how long he had been there and how much he had heard. The suspicious comment worried me some but not too much. That was just “Pat being Pat” as people liked to say.
Pat Faber made his reputation on folksy aphorisms. Apparently, he used to vacation in Montana and that credential alone granted him the credibility to spout country pearls like, “The owl of ignorance lays the egg of pride” and “You can’t buy the wrench until you know what size pipe you’re working with.” They had the resonance of something profound but couldn’t stand up to three seconds of reflection. However, that didn’t matter as far as his career was concerned. Pat quickly built an image of the “Wise Sage” and he rode it straight to a senior director role. That development would cause much anguish for scores of associates.
It was a firm rite that on every big project someone would recommend you “Run it by Pat.” With that single request you were sentenced to hearing another of his homespun summations of your challenges that was either incorrect, incomprehensible, or both. But that’s not what you told him. Given Pat’s standing at the firm, the responses were much more supportive and included words like “game-changer,”
“unique perspective,” and “out-of-the-box thinking.”
Eventually, Pat began to actually believe in the myth of Pat and he became a mockery of himself. It was, after all, a lofty image to uphold, and Pat felt the need to live up to it at all times. The aphorisms fell into overuse; they became hackneyed and tired. The projects associates had to run by Pat soon were of less and less significance. And eventually, Pat just became some weird guy spouting nonsense to the team determining what brand of coffee to serve in the break rooms. This was my direct report.
Pat fittingly chose to sit on the counter and not the formal chair. There was a forced casualness to the decision. “I was up in Washington in May,” he began. I pulled a chair up and gave him my full attention. One learned to be wary of “shootin’ the breeze” conversations in Corporate America—often those were the most lethal. “You know I have a cabin on the Columbia?” he asked, and my stomach fell out. He was about to give me the salmon story.
“Sockeye are running this week,” he started. “The river was just boiling with fish. You don’t have to be an angler to land a twenty-pounder, you just need a line and a hook and maybe not even that!”
“That’s terrific,” I commented but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to match the word “teriffic.”
“Must have been quite a time.”
Pat didn’t acknowledge me. There was a story to tell and by god he was going to tell it.
“My last day there I went off the main river and followed one of the feeders deep into the woods. I can’t tell you how far I hiked, must have been a few miles. I was exhausted like them sockeye in the river. We were one at that moment.”
“I bet,” I said.
“Onwards, I continued. And the deeper into the woods I went, the greater the number of sockeye that couldn’t make it grew. Remember, these beasts came from Alaska. It was the journey of a lifetime, thousands of miles. You’d see them in the eddies hiding in the shadows of the rocks. You figure they were resting, getting their bearings, but most were just giving up. Some didn’t have what it takes to make it. Quitters didn’t want to go on and finish the run.”
Pat looked up at me, and I knew exactly what he was talking about. The salmon run was his on-the-nose metaphor for our collective corporate careers. We were all on the journey from Alaska to the Puget Sound, into the mouth of the mighty Columbia, ten million strong. Up the river we went, promoting our way from one tributary to the next until the run thinned to just a few, determined sockeye who would finally lay that retirement nest egg that ensures their stock will continue for future generations. Humans have an enduring capacity to attach grand meaning to meaningless things. What Pat neglected to say was that after the salmon lays its egg, it dies before it’s able to enjoy it.
Within the narrative of the Great Sockeye Run was a not-so-subtle message questioning my commitment. It was just the nature of things that folks who made it to the finish line naturally believed everyone else sought what they fought so hard to get. And thus the idea that some people didn’t want that same glory was wholly unpalatable. Pat looked at me like I was one of those scared quitters circling peacefully in the cool, dark waters of the eddy until the game was over. And he couldn’t have been more accurate.
I never wanted the career. This salmon had wanted to turn back at the mouth of the Columbia. But at a certain point it became too late to retrace my steps. A modicum of competence had gotten me to a certain level, at which point I pulled off to the side of the great journey and bided my time. The salary wasn’t top-tier but it was good enough. And the benefits provided the security blanket everyone longed for. I was safe and out of the spotlight; that is, until Bob Gershon retired.
Suddenly, there was an opening in the department for a senior leader, and they wanted to see if I would go for it. I had no choice.
“I’m glad you stopped by, Pat.”
“Oh?”
“This morning I asked my admin to find some time on your calendar,” I lied.
“Is that right? What did you want to discuss?”
“Pat,” I said, choking down the faint taste of bile in the back of my throat, “I’m the man to run the group.”
A MAN AND HIS PIGS
Hector checked his watch with a slightly annoyed look as I approached the Lincoln. I ignored him and gave the address for Sheila Lansing’s house in Pacoima.
We pulled onto the 101 and fell into a brisk twenty-mile-per-hour pace. My mind immediately went to the conversation with Pat. Now that I was committed to getting the lead role, I had to actually come up with some ideas to warrant giving it to me. Truth was I was drawing off a barren field.
I focused my efforts on the two great motivators: fear and greed. If I could find one of those things that could either get them to salivate or to soil their shorts, I would have no problem through the interview process. Do both at the same time and they’d be talking about director material. The problem was that there were so few fears left. Most had been eradicated from Corporate America—health issues associated with smoking, threats of lawsuits for discrimination and sexual harassment.
I knew what Paul, the perpetually thin man who never worked out and loathed anyone above a fifteen percent body mass index, would pitch. He’d pimp the noonday run-walks he organized that no one attended, weight-loss seminars that always started out strong but suffered from attrition after only a few days, and one cockamamie idea that associates traveling between one or two floors were required to take the stairs.
In Paul’s defense, the medical costs associated with our small number of obese associates far exceeded the combined totals of the rest, and it wasn’t even close. But it always felt like there was something more to his fixation on this “terrible disease,” something that went far beyond the costs he could save the company. Every new idea was positioned with a false sense of concern—“these poor folks are really struggling and nee
d our help”—that I never believed came from a genuine place. Of course, that could have been because I hadn’t had a fresh idea in ten years and was merely envious of the inroads he could potentially make with senior management.
I was so wrapped up in my brainstorm session that I barely noticed we had pulled off the freeway and entered the residential neighborhoods of Pacoima. Hector navigated us through the bedroom community to a quiet street one block from the looming foothills.
The street was in the middle of a wholesale rejuvenation drawing largely off the influx of young professionals new to the home-ownership game. And while its youthful neighbors had fully embraced the home-improvement movement, Sheila’s house stood out like a stalwart. It seemed content with its generic concrete driveway and occasionally mowed crabgrass despite the yards around it displaying elaborate designs of river rock, succulents, and PVC fencing.
I rang the bell a few times but got no answer. A nosy neighbor working on a finicky sprinkler head called out to us. He wore an oversized landscaper’s hat common among Mexican gardeners, but the person underneath was very white.
“They’re not home,” he said.
I walked over to the fence that divided the lots.
“Do you know Sheila Lansing?”
“Sheila?” he repeated like the name was foreign to him. “Yeah, I know Sheila. But she doesn’t live here anymore. She moved into an elder care home about three years ago. No one takes care of the yard,” he said with remorse. “Such a shame. It could be a really nice house.”
“You don’t happen to know which home?”
The Perpetual Summer Page 5