The Perpetual Summer

by Adam Walker Phillips

  I dropped him off on First Street in front of police central headquarters.

  “What’s going to happen to Nelson?” I asked.

  “We’ll just talk to him for a few hours and see what we can get and then send him home.”

  “He probably won’t say much.”

  “That’s what everyone thinks. Until they actually get in there.”

  “No, I just don’t think he knows much about the girl’s murder.”

  “You said before that you thought the murder and the old man’s missing granddaughter were connected.”

  “I think the Valenti girl has the information, not this kid.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “If I did, I wouldn’t be hanging with you.”

  “What’s he paying you, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Nothing. He fired me.”

  Detective Ricohr mulled that over. He let two late commuter buses, with their roaring engines and plumes of exhaust, pass by.

  “If you find the girl, do you find my killer?”

  “When I find the girl and talk to her, your killer should become very clear.”

  “You hope.”

  “You hope,” I corrected.

  “We both hope.” He headed into the building.

  “Detective,” I called him back. “I’m sorry for not telling you everything ahead of time. And you may not believe it, but I was going to call you after I had spoken to the kid.”

  “Save the apology for later,” he said. “I suspect this won’t be the last time you disappoint me.”

  Tired as I was, I headed in the opposite direction of my house and drove out toward the Westside. I stopped at a diner just off the 10 Freeway and sat in one of the booths by the window. I picked at a tuna melt and fries but mostly I watched the heavy stream of traffic funneling on and off the freeway. There was something hypnotic about it. After the third time I was asked about a water refill, I got the hint and decided to give them their booth back.

  Time never moves more slowly than when you’re trying to kill it. I drove aimlessly around the side streets but that was only good for a half hour. I did a couple of tricks of randomly picking destinations and then driving there and back a few times like a runner doing track work. Finally I gave up and drove over to Nelson’s house and parked in one of the few open spots on the street.

  I don’t know how long it took because I dozed off a few times but eventually a car appeared and parked in the narrow driveway. Nelson squeezed out of the passenger door and headed for the house with his tatted-up brother at his side. If I factored in all of the wasted time in and around any visit to a police station, the fact that Nelson was home before midnight was a bit of a miracle. Detective Ricohr had kept to his word.

  I wasn’t finished with Nelson. He was my one link to Jeanette. I got out of the car, though not entirely sure what I was going to do to get past his brother and overprotective abuelita, never mind what I would say to him to get him to talk to me again. In that moment of hesitancy, I watched Nelson and his brother walk toward the front door and I marveled at the unspoken support emanating from the backs of one person walking next to another in silence. There was no steadying hand, no arm around the shoulder. The brother didn’t even hold the door for Nelson. But the young man was back with his family and that was a good thing.

  I got in my car, fired up the engine, and headed out for the long ride back to Eagle Rock. The black sedan waited for me in front of my house.

  A DIFFERENT KIND OF DYING

  I parked in the garage and came out the side door. Hector waited for me on the walkway. We silently made our way inside, and he stood patiently in the center of the living room while I turned on some lights and opened the windows to let in the cooling night air.

  “They got another email,” he told me after I stopped buzzing around the room. I made a move to sit down, but Hector made no move at all, so I remained standing. “They want more money.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Three million.”

  This time I sat down and thought it over. That was quite a jump from $45,000. “I assume it came from Jeanette?” He nodded. “Did you see the actual email?”

  “It was sent to Mr. Valenti. I heard him talking to his daughter and Jeanette’s dad.”

  “What did you mean by ‘they’ wanting more money?” Hector shrugged his shoulders but I could tell he had some ideas. “The police found the Portillo boy,” I said, and explained exactly how they found him, but the mention of the boy didn’t register with Hector. “Who do you think it is?”

  Hector deferred to his boss. “Mr. Valenti said if it was either of them he’d crush them.”

  “Either of whom? Meredith and Jeff?”

  “He told them when they came to the house.”

  It was not a surprise that Valenti had suspicions about his daughter and her ex-husband. He was innately suspicious of everyone when it came to money. I wondered if he thought they were in on it together. Individually, they both had the motive, and if I thought about it enough, I could imagine each attempting something like this, or trying it together.

  “Sit down,” I instructed. “You’re making me nervous.” Hector shot me a look but eventually took a seat on the couch. “What do you think about this?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not my business.”

  “Then why did you come here to tell me about it?”

  “I thought you would want to know.”

  That reason made little sense. He had already pushed the limits of his relationship with Valenti when we were working together, but the act of coming to my house smashed all of those limits in one stroke. He was betraying the confidence of the family to someone whom his boss had dismissed. Valenti valued privacy above almost anything and this impropriety would have repercussions beyond Hector’s mere dismissal from the job he’d held for nearly fifty years.

  “You know something that you’re not telling me.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “I know you aren’t but you’re also not telling me everything. You’re concerned about something. Otherwise, you would never have come all this way in the middle of the night. What is it?”

  “I told you everything.”

  “When are they supposed to pay it?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow night. We’re gonna get the instructions tomorrow in the morning on where to bring the money.” Hector paused a moment. “I’ll be delivering it.”

  “Is the family bringing in the police?”

  “No,” he answered, but it didn’t sound like he agreed with that decision. From my limited time with Hector, I never got the sense that he was a card-carrying member of the Police Benevolent Society. He was a man who preferred to settle his own disputes in a manner of his choosing. The fact that he had some misgivings about leaving the police out hinted further that he was concerned about something.

  “Are you worried about what might happen to you tomorrow?”

  Hector shifted in his seat into an even more upright position.

  “I can handle myself,” he said coolly.

  “Then what is it?”

  “I think she’s dead.”

  The words hit me hard. It was one of those conclusions you ruled out because internally you weren’t prepared for it.

  “Why do you think that?” I wanted Hector to defend his opinion so I could shoot it down.

  “I saw the email,” he admitted and stared at the floor. “They printed a copy and left it on the desk. I shouldn’t have read it.”

  “What did it say?” I asked.

  “It said that if Mr. Valenti didn’t pay the money that he would never see the baby alive.”

  “That’s it?” He nodded, but I didn’t understand how that sentence meant Jeanette was dead. “I would never bring my baby into it,” he explained before I could ask. “A parent doesn’t do that.”

  And there I was again, not understanding the realities of being a parent.

  “She
’s dead,” he stated. As if even his convinced mind wasn’t quite ready to abandon even a trace of hope, he added, “I think.”

  “What does the family say?”

  “Mr. Valenti is afraid like me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Again there was a hesitation. After decades of subservience, it didn’t come easy to talk so openly about his boss.

  “After his daughter left,” he began, “I saw him in his study. He was crying. I never seen him cry, not for anything. It didn’t look like him. He saw me and I thought he’d yell at me or worse, but he just stared and cried. He told me he couldn’t lose them.”

  “Do you know who the father of Jeanette’s baby is?” Hector shook his head. “Your boss was very close to his granddaughter, wasn’t he?” It came out crasser than I intended, not that any degree of tact would have mattered because once the allegation registered with Hector, he leapt to his feet and his right hand flicked for his pocket. “Take it easy,” I said. He stared at me with distant eyes. For the first time in our relationship, I was actually afraid of the man. “Hector, listen to me. You didn’t come here because you thought I was out to get the old man. You want to help him and you think I can help you do it. And I’m trying. I want to bring Jeanette home as much as you do and almost as much as Valenti.”

  Hector hadn’t moved and it was unclear if any of the things I said had any effect on moving his hand away from the nifty little number in his pocket. I wanted to get him talking.

  “If I’m going to help you, I am going to need some answers. You and Valenti have a pretty tight bond—I can see that by the way you defend him. I need to know why.”

  The forever-young man with young-man-like reflexes and a younger man’s temperament seemed to dissolve in an instant. I could now see the grays beneath the shoe-polish black. I felt the aches in his lower back. I saw the tired eyes of someone who had seen too much over too many decades.

  “I should have died,” he said, but the death he was referring to was not the one I assumed it was.

  Hector recounted the events leading up to the night in 1963 when Gao’s uncle Heng lay dead on the street in the Alpine District. To my surprise he came right out and admitted to killing the man. “I stabbed him in the stomach and he didn’t fight any more,” he stated. Hector looked straight at me when he said it. I searched for signs of remorse and found none. But it wasn’t like he was proud of the deed, either. There was a strange detachment from the retelling of the death, a matter-of-factness that escaped my own sensibilities.

  The actual events were mundane to the point of being clichés. Hector was working for the construction company that Valenti owned. It was his first real attempt at a stable earning life. The job was a small development where a corner of a block was being converted into row houses. Hector explained that there were troubles immediately with the job. Their work was periodically vandalized, their supplies constantly delayed, their tools stolen. “That was the worst part,” Hector explained, “because we had to bring our own tools and without your tools you couldn’t work. It cost a lot of money to replace them. It was money out of our pockets.”

  Everyone was certain that Heng Li was behind it. It wasn’t much of a secret, as his cronies taunted the workers whenever they could. They often hung around the job site, and sometimes Heng himself joined them. There were a few skirmishes between the two groups but nothing very serious came out of it—that is, until the night of the murder.

  Hector was out with friends in some of the dives around Bunker Hill. This was long before the hill became the glittering home of my corporate headquarters. At that time the Victorian neighborhood was a shell of its former self with seedy establishments haunted by lost souls left over from another era. The birth, death, and rebirth of communities comprise a never-ending story in Los Angeles.

  The couple of pops with friends turned into an all-night bender as they crawled from jukebox to jukebox and cruised the tunnels under the hill in a borrowed convertible. At some point in the night, Hector crossed the line of no return and decided to power through with a few more drinks and then get himself sobered up before his morning shift started. Home in East LA was too far away, and no one was of any mind to drive him out that way. They continued on until the group lost its steam, and Hector had his friends drop him off at the construction site, where he found a pile of wrapping from roofing tiles and used that as a makeshift bed to sleep off the bender.

  He was awoken by sounds of shattering glass. It was near sunrise and Hector had to orient himself, and his woozy head, to the commotion coming from no more than fifteen feet away. He saw Heng smashing a set of newly installed windows with a roofer’s hammer. Hector confronted him and the two faced off.

  “I guess I could have took off,” he reflected and then summed up why he hadn’t. “We’re all just stupid, I guess.”

  Hector pulled his knife, Heng took a swipe at him with the hammer, and then it was over. All along I waited for Valenti’s entrance into the narrative. And now that we were at a point when a man lay dead, I was both confused and a bit dubious about the whole thing.

  “I don’t understand. How did Valenti save your life?”

  “He showed up to the job site an hour later and found me. I was crying—crying like a little baby. This guy was dead and my life was over. He asked me what happened, and I told him.”

  “Then what?”

  “He left, told me to stay where I was and not do anything. He came back twenty minutes later with the boy’s father.”

  I made him repeat that last part. I had heard it clearly enough but it didn’t sink in. He confirmed that Valenti brought the elder Li to the construction site and showed him the poor boy’s body and explained what happened. Hector apologized to the man, but the old developer didn’t say anything to him. He and Valenti eventually walked away to talk in private. Valenti returned alone and gave Hector instructions.

  “We were supposed to call the police and say that Heng had threatened Valenti with a hammer and that I came in to protect him and that’s how the boy died.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell the police the truth? It wasn’t murder the way it happened.” His look was enough of a reply to make me sorry I asked. In those days there wasn’t a lot of faith in the police or the courts to listen to reason, especially when minorities were involved. He was right in assuming his chances were slim to none.

  “Either way I was supposed to die that day. Either get killed or get sent to jail,” which in his world was just a different kind of dying. “And he saved my life. I owe him.”

  THE CORNFIELDS

  I was five minutes late for the rendezvous with Hector the next night because Pat Faber had dropped by my office as I was leaving to see if I was getting nervous about the upcoming interview. That wasn’t how he phrased it, but I could tell that was his intention. I told him I looked forward to the competition and I was going to “rise to the challenge,” but the hope for a quick chat was not in the cards. Pat reflected on the many defining points in his career where he similarly rose to the challenge—and won. After several minutes of my telling him how invaluable his perspective was, I finally extricated myself from the tedious discussion so I could go meet Hector.

  His sedan was parked in one of the three slots in-front of the Phoenix Bakery in Chinatown. I had to park on the street. The sweetened air around the bakery was so pervasive that each breath felt like another layer of sticky film was added to my throat. It made me thirsty, but it just could have been that I was nervous.

  Hector got out when he saw me and was not pleased with my tardiness. I knew enough to skip an apology and just get down to business.

  “Badger here?” I asked.

  “Right here,” came the reply as Badger stepped out of the shadowy area by the restaurant next door. He wore his amber sunglasses despite the moonless night and this desolate part of the city being one of the darkest in the area. I could barely see anything beyond an arm’s reach, but he maneuvered easily a
nd proffered a conciliatory hand to Hector.

  Earlier that day, Valenti had been instructed to deliver the money to a spot in the middle of the Cornfields, a long park that used to be a railway yard just east of Chinatown. Hector was the natural choice to perform the deed, but Valenti didn’t know about me being involved, and Hector did not expect Badger to be there as well. He stared at Badger’s outstretched hand with visible contempt.

  “No hard feelings, Paco,” said Badger, doing his best to provoke an already annoyed man.

  Hector looked to me for an explanation.

  “Another set of eyes can’t hurt,” I told him. He didn’t like it but he didn’t have much of a choice as we were an hour away from the appointed time. “Do you have the money?” I asked Hector because that felt like the right thing to do, though the idea that he would forget the money on the night of the drop was absurd.

  Despite all that, Hector moved around to the back of the sedan and opened the trunk for us. Three million in cash was surprisingly smaller than I anticipated. I envisioned a forklift and a heavy pallet but instead got a medium-size duffel bag. But it was heavy—very heavy.

  For a moment while holding that bag, I felt the warmth and comforts of being a millionaire. And I had an impulse to bolt. I heard Badger grunt behind me. Even Hector cast a sly, little smile. This was the moment when someone would casually suggest the money getting lost and the three of us running off to Mexico. Hector squelched that dream by snatching the bag from my hand and replacing it in the bed of the trunk.

  We went over the plan while standing there in the bakery parking lot. Hector would deliver the money as expected. He was going to enter the south side of the park, off of Spring Street. Badger, with his WW II battleship binoculars, would position himself on the Gold Line platform toward the west end of the park that offered an elevated and unobstructed view of the entire area. I would wait in my car on the north side of the park on Broadway. This also offered an elevated view of the area as the land gradually sloped upward toward Elysian Park, the 110 Freeway, and Dodger Stadium. But it also was an exposed area with very little cover and almost no human activity at night. I needed to be careful lest I was spotted before the drop could be made.