Gao brushed by me and unlocked the front entrance.
“We wanted to talk to you about an old building in Alhambra. It’s filled with a bunch of Chinese women and babies. But I don’t remember seeing any sign about it being a hospital.”
My words spooked a few of his cronies and they peeled off. Even Gao looked a little unsure but he masked it well.
“What does that have to do with me?”
“The owner of the building is a corporation that lists this address,” I said and pointed to the building behind him.
“Thanks for letting me know,” he said and took a step inside.
“How much do you charge?” I called after him. “I’m sure it’s not cheap.” One aspect of Gao’s New China narrative, one he conveniently left out, was that despite the economic boom vaulting many Chinese into the upper levels of wealth, it didn’t mean they actually wanted to raise their families there.
“What do they come over on, tourist visas?” I pressed. “Spend a few weeks in that dump, deliver their babies and leave with US citizenship for their kids. Not a bad deal, depending on the price.”
“Take off before you regret it,” Gao responded coldly. Hector didn’t like his tone and took a step forward. I reached out and grabbed hold of his arm.
“Hold up, Hector. It’s not worth it.”
Gao cocked his head.
“What’d you say?” he asked but he directed it at Hector, not me. Gao seemed to be doing a calculation in his head and when he finally came to his answer he took a bold step forward. “Hector Hermosillo?” he asked. “Hector Hermosillo?” he repeated.
I didn’t like what was going on at that moment and instinctively pulled Hector toward me. Gao and his cronies started to form a circle around us. I used a car pulling into the lot as a way to put some distance between us and kept pushing Hector in the back, guiding him toward the car. My phone buzzed in my pocket.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Jeanette’s father shouted before I could even get off a hello.
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you harassing Mr. Li?”
I looked around the parking lot expecting to see Jeff watching us watching Gao. I didn’t find him.
“I’m not following. We’re here in Arcadia outside his office.”
“What?!” he screamed. “You’re where?”
“In Arcadia.”
“Get out of there before you ruin it entirely!”
“Ruin what?” I asked.
“Just get out!”
Not that I needed any encouragement to leave the area, but his tone grated on me. And I didn’t appreciate how he felt the need to boss me around.
“Calm down,” I told him. “We’ll come to your office.”
The foundation’s main entry was unlocked. We found Jeff in his office poring over a folder of papers. There was a new installation behind him. It was the extreme close-up of a woman’s face projected onto a ten-by-ten screen. Although she remained very still there were slight movements, a twitch here and there to clue you in that it wasn’t a still photograph but an actual video. After about a minute I caught her first blink. She looked Nordic, had cold, dull eyes, and stared impassively at the void before her. After the last installation this work must have been a welcome respite.
“Nice piece,” I commented, but Jeff was in no mood to talk art.
“Are you fucking with me?” he shouted.
“Take it easy.”
“What did I ever do to you?” It wasn’t necessarily a rhetorical question but it was still one of those you didn’t need to, or want to, answer. “Seriously,” he persisted, “what did I ever do to you?”
“Mr. Schwartzman—”
“Don’t ‘mister’ me, all right? Pretending to be all businesslike after you’ve fucked me over. I welcomed you into this office. I told you things and was very forthright about everything. And you sat there and listened and then went and stabbed me in the back. I thought we were cut from the same cloth. And now you’re pulling out the formalities.”
“We’re all cut from the same cloth,” I told him.
“This isn’t a joke.”
“It wasn’t meant to be a joke.”
“Why is he here?” he questioned with an outstretched finger pointed in Hector’s direction. Before he would allow me to explain, Jeff commanded that Hector leave the room.
“Let’s just relax and talk like adults,” I said.
“You ruined the museum for me,” he started on another tangent.
“I didn’t ruin anything,” I countered.
Jeff was a one-punch fighter. He took his shot and if it didn’t land, he either ran or moved on to find a heavier weapon. His armory was running thin because he was already reverting to the pity club.
“Gao doesn’t want anything to do with me,” he moaned. “He called me and said we’re through. That he won’t support the ballot initiative. He thinks it’s a trick. He thinks I am in on it with the old man.” I thought about how the direction of this great city could so easily be altered by a cryptically worded ballot initiative started by one unstable man and promoted by an equally, yet differently unstable, man. “How crazy is this world?” he asked as if he could hear my thoughts, but he was referencing something else altogether. “The guy I’d rather see dead as my partner in crime,” he said with a laugh. I couldn’t tell if he had forgotten Hector was in the room or he made that comment on purpose. “What the hell did you say to Gao to get him to think that?”
I recapped my first uncomfortable meeting when Gao thought I was coming to see him with a peace offer from Valenti. “I don’t know how he got that idea,” I said, watching for Jeff’s reaction. There wasn’t much, but I was still certain he had helped foment the idea in one of their many discussions. “Today’s meeting was a little unexpected. There was a building in Alhambra, an old Victorian with several Chinese occupants.”
“They aren’t all related, you know,” he said.
“I tracked down the corporation on the deed,” I continued, “and that led me out to Arcadia to a development company linked to Mr. Li. We happened to be at the office; I questioned him on it and he flew off the handle.”
“Well, why wouldn’t he? You’re harassing him about some stupid building. No wonder he thinks you’re trying to undermine him.”
“It’s not a stupid building, Mr. Schwartzman.”
“Knock the mister crap off.”
“It’s not a stupid building,” I repeated. He already had his next snarky comeback ready and was just waiting for me to finish so he could lob it my way. “Its address is linked to your daughter.”
He got as far as the first word when my comment hit him and its meaning finally registered. That wiped the smirk right off his face.
“Jeanette,” he whispered. It was the look of legitimate remorse. “What do you mean by linked?”
I explained what Hector and I discovered inside the Victorian house. Jeff listened to the details with a look of both shock and confusion. When I finished, he asked,
“But what does that have to do with Jeanette?”
“You knew your daughter was pregnant, right?”
“Pregnant?” he said in a way that made you feel the nausea he was experiencing. The man grabbed at the thinning hair on the sides of his head and let his hands drag down and tug onto both ears. He muttered something to himself, even using the second-person tense to add to the severity of the personal indictment. I couldn’t exactly make it out but it sounded like, “You’re such an asshole.”
Hector and I diverted our eyes. It was difficult to witness a man’s humiliation on something so fundamental as raising a child. I turned to Hector to suggest that we leave him alone with his thoughts.
Then, the room erupted with a woman’s bloodcurdling scream. I had never heard something so primal. I instinctively ducked and covered my head with my arms. Hector leapt to his feet and pulled the knife from his pocket. Jeff didn’t move an inch. He sat at the desk and ke
pt his face buried in his hands.
After a moment I realized the source of the scream came from the art installation on the wall. The woman’s face in the video was back to that cold stare but you could see her chest heaving as she recovered from having just wrenched her guts out. She was composing herself for the next scream.
“I can’t figure out how to shut it off,” Jeff mumbled. The broken man was getting closer to the moment when he would accept defeat and all the ignominy that came with it. He had an expression of serene surrender. But my read on Jeff was slightly off, as he apparently had more fight left in him.
“What do you need from me?” he asked, raising his eyes to meet mine. “I have to do something to help bring Jeanette home.”
“If you ask her to do something, do you think she will do it?”
“Probably not,” he admitted, “but I can try.”
“That’s all we want,” I told him. “We need your help, Jeff. Ask her to come home.”
That seemed to warm his spirits some.
“This nonsense has gone on long enough,” he stated, rising from his chair. “It’s time to bring her home.”
I took his offer for a handshake. He was feeling magnanimous enough to extend the offer even to Hector. The old bastard took a moment but he eventually accepted it.
I glanced up at the video behind Jeff. I didn’t know how long the intervals were between screams, but just knowing it was coming cast an unnerving pall over the room. I wanted to be long gone before it happened.
Jeff walked us to his office door but no farther.
“I have a few calls to make to my daughter,” he announced. It was good to have him back from the edge. He was a noticeably different person. “And who knows,” he added cheerfully. “We get this thing cleared up, perhaps the museum deal can still be salvaged. That’s not the priority, obviously,” he amended, “but it could be one outcome of all this craziness.”
Hector and I left him with his calls and his illusions and made our way out of the foundation’s office. We got as far as the elevator before the woman’s scream came barreling down the empty hall after us. It was still going as the doors closed to whisk us downstairs.
A TIGHT WINDOW
The drive over to Beverlywood took three times longer than it should have. By the time we parked in front of Nelson Portilla’s house, the sun had long since vaporized the marine layer and beat down on us with little obstruction.
After the mini-victory with Jeff Schwartzman, I wanted to speak to the kid’s grandmother and solicit her help in bringing her boy home—and Jeanette with him. But Hector, with his dark glasses and knife poking out of his pocket, didn’t put many people at ease. The last time they met he violated her home and nearly ran her over in the process.
“I need to speak to her alone,” I said, “and convince her it’s in the boy’s best interest to help us.” Hector shot me a look like he had no faith in me and my persuasion capabilities. “You have your doubts?”
“We made a deal,” he shrugged.
“Yes, we did.”
“It’s never good to come between an abuelita and her boy,” he warned as I approached the house. That gave me pause as I recalled the abuelita’s other “boy” and his heavily armed thug friends.
“Well, it’s better than throwing her son in a headlock,” I shouted back with little to no conviction.
After several knocks, the old woman opened the door and recognized me with a broad smile. She graciously shuffled me inside and as I crossed the threshold I shot Hector a look for doubting me.
I had caught the woman in between weekend telenovelas. She fumbled with the remote to shut off the television, which took quite a while. I scanned the dusty framed photographs on the console. They were your typical school photos of awkwardly smiling boys many years before they became the tattooed, hardened men of today. Nelson’s was easy to spot, with his sweeping hair and brooding eyes and look of ineffectual contempt for the world. The chattering of the commercials now silenced, the old woman cleared a spot for me to sit on the couch. Ten minutes of declining offers to eat and drink everything she had in the house soon followed. I finally accepted a glass of water and a greasy pupusa to get her to stop.
“That was delicious,” I lied, and brought the discussion back to the original purpose of the visit. “I am worried about Nelson.”
The mention of the boy’s name brought a sun-spotted hand to her faintly beating heart. Whatever pleasure she got from feeding a stranger in her house was cast aside by a deep sadness that washed over her face. She muttered some words that sounded like a lament and then gently kissed her fingers.
“Let me help you bring him home,” I offered and placed my hand on her knee.
“He no come home,” she moaned.
“It’s okay, I can help.”
“He such a good boy. He my baby,” she said softly.
“I understand. And believe me, I want to help.”
She stood and got the photo down from the shelf and handed it to me. She said something in Spanish and I picked up the word “principe” but nothing else. That word had meaning to me. The only other time I heard it was in reference to a less-than-princely figure. I wondered how accurate it was this time. The woman again kissed her fingers and this time pressed them to the boy’s forehead in the photo.
From the back of the house came a high-pitched squeal and the sound of thrashing bodies. Hector emerged from the kitchen door. He carried a chubby, red-faced teenager like he was a little baby, except this newborn had fists. Hector plopped Nelson onto the couch vacated by his grandmother. The overstuffed sofa bounced the kid like a car in desperate need of new shocks.
“I caught him coming out the back window,” Hector told me. “He could barely fit,” he added.
The old woman rushed over to console her boy. She had a few choice words for Hector who quietly took them like he was the child who had spent a lifetime disappointing her. He let her have her say, which was plenty. Apparently the fact that she lied to me and was just stalling to give her boy time to escape didn’t factor into the list of things to admonish. I followed Hector’s lead and let her get it all out of her system.
“Nelson, we’re trying to help you,” I said during a break in the abuelita’s recriminations. “Can’t you see that?”
“Whatever,” he pouted, the word every teenager resorted to when they had nothing to say.
Hector made a move toward him, but I held out my arm to intercept.
“Can we talk together in the back?” I asked the boy. I needed to get him away from the security blanket to his left and the menacing figure in front of him. I gestured for him to follow me. He reluctantly took my lead and got up from the couch. Once more I had to tell Hector to stay behind. He shot me a look and then glanced at the old woman, whose eyes bored in on him.
“I’ll go outside,” he decided. “Lock the windows,” he advised as he went out the front door.
Nelson’s room was smaller than a junior walk-in closet. Twin beds placed in one of the corners created a perfect L-shaped “couch.” I sat first. The bed creaked and sagged so much that I feared I wouldn’t be able to stand up without a struggle. Nelson wasn’t fully committed and remained in the doorway.
The walls were plastered with a collage of music posters, fashion magazine pages, and his own photographs. The black-and-white photos were of an artistic bent with their Dutch angles and extreme close-ups. There was an inordinate number of reflection shots—through mirrors, glass doors, and off ponds and puddles. I marveled at youth’s unceasing ability to seek depth in shallow pools.
I pointed to one of the few photos with human subjects. It was a close-up of Nelson and Jeanette, cheeks pressed together, smiling up at the camera held an arm’s length away.
“You two look happy,” I said.
Nelson didn’t bother to look up. He stared at some random spot on the carpet like he was trying to burn a hole through its already thin threads. A duffel bag packed nearly full of
clothes sat on the floor close to the spot where Nelson focused all of his intense attention.
“Where were you going with all of that?” I asked. Failing to get him to engage, I tried a different tack. “Did you learn how to drive a stick shift yet?” I teased. This kid had some anger in him, and if there was any chance of getting him to talk, I was going to have to engage that anger.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Nelson, but you’re an idiot. Guys like you and me—but definitely guys like you—” I clarified after giving him the once-over, “don’t take on guys like Valenti.”
I was intentionally casual about my delivery to try to convey an inevitableness to what I was about to tell him. “Do you know how much money he has? Whatever money you think he has, multiply it by a thousand, and then you’ll be halfway there.”
“You think I care?”
“You should. That kind of money buys you things, and I don’t mean stuff like a home better than this.” I made a dismissive gesture to the shabby surroundings.
“That’s how we’re different,” he said, mustering some self-righteousness, “because that kind of thing don’t matter to me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I corrected. “And you’d like to think it doesn’t, but it does. With his kind of dough people can be bought for a price. Me—why else would I be wasting my time here with you? That old pachuco out front, you—”
He scoffed. I gave it a brief pause.
“Jeanette.”
“You don’t know her,” he shot back.
“I don’t have to.”
“She doesn’t even care about money.”
“Rich people always say that.”
“She’s different,” he countered. “You wouldn’t even know it when talking to her that she’s super rich. She’s just a regular girl,” then realizing how inadequate that sounded, he appended, “but also different. Special.”
All along I never thought that Nelson’s involvement with Jeanette’s disappearance had any trace of a malicious nature. His strident defense of his girl made me wonder if all of this was simply over the star-crossed young love of two kids from disparate neighborhoods. A for-profit school with a mission for diversity brought them together. A baby eventually came out of it. It seemed so antiquated for contemporary Los Angeles, and for what seemed like a fairly progressive family, but some prejudices run silent and they run very deep.
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