“What does failure look like?”
“A man who accepts things as ‘good enough.’”
“What’s the one thing you would change about yourself?”
“Nothing. The first step is recognizing your faults then figuring out how to succeed despite them.”
“What would you change about me?”
“Ask easier questions.”
“Why shouldn’t we select Paul for the job?”
“I want to be selected on my strengths, not on another man’s weaknesses.”
They kept coming, and I kept knocking them down. I took the best he had, and Pat knew it. By the end of it he looked more tired than I felt. He leaned back and offered up one more, a true softball if there ever was one.
“What will be your legacy?” he asked.
All I had to do was come up with a pithy reply about generational change and throw in some anecdote to seal it. Victory sat right in front of me. But I didn’t take it. I just sat there and said nothing. An uneasiness settled over the room. I detected a trace of glee as Pat watched me struggle.
The simple question had the effect of smelling salts under my nose. I was suddenly overcome with the clarity that comes from complete detachment. We were talking, after all, about a legacy of a body of work that had no meaning. And then I remembered Bob Gershon, the gentle giant who learned that fact too late in his career to do anything about it. I saw his face as if he were there in the room with me. I watched him disappear behind the elevator doors. Then I recalled the photo of a young Jeanette digging her toes into the sand. She was likely lost forever with no answers to explain why. And the entire thing became pointless.
One can fake it for only so long. I shook off my stupor and focused in on Pat.
“I probably won’t have one,” I answered, which was the first bit of honesty I mustered all day. “And if I were ever fortunate enough to have a legacy, I hope to God it wouldn’t be for this job.”
I noticed it first on my way to lunch. And it was still there on my way back. Most of the black sedans parked in the loading zone in front of my building lingered for no more than the time it took to throw a travel bag into the trunk for the executive on his way to the airport. But this sedan sat idling, the tinted windows obscuring the occupant behind the glass.
I was foolish to let myself believe it was Hector inside there. I wanted to see if he was okay. I also had many questions to ask him. But his legal issues were far from over and there was no way he would be back into his old routine of driving Valenti around the city.
“Can we talk?” a voice called out as I passed by the car.
It was Valenti.
I came back and joined him in the front seat. He picked up on my surprise at him driving his own car.
“I drove a truck when I was younger,” he shot back. “I’m not that completely out of touch with the real world.”
The air conditioner was pumping a steady stream of cold air that made the hair on my forearms stand up. As if sensing this, he lowered it to a gentle breeze.
“Anything I can do to help smooth things over at work?” he offered. “I could place a call.”
Even Valenti’s influence couldn’t undo the damage I had done. I declined his offer. “I like to think I got myself into this situation and it’s on me to get myself out.”
“Still have that chip on your shoulder,” said Valenti.
“How’s Hector?” I asked.
“Hector will be fine.” Then, appended, “legally, that is.”
“Has he been released?”
“Yes, he is out but has some charges lingering that we can hopefully get cleared up soon.” There was paternal pride in his voice. “We have the right folks working on it.”
I didn’t have a delicate way of broaching the subject of Jeanette and decided to just ask it outright.
“Have you heard from her?”
The man deflated. His only response came in the form of a barely perceptible shrug. Faced with an outcome he didn’t want to accept, he seemed to be here as part of a last-ditch effort to find some scrap of hope to keep him from avoiding the inevitable. I was tempted to oblige but couldn’t seem to piece together a lie.
“I’m sorry,” I said instead.
He turned away from me and placed his hand on the shifter. I took that as the signal that our brief encounter was finished.
“Who’s going to take care of this old man?” he asked absently.
All this talk about fortunes and inheritances and cycles of wealth suddenly felt insignificant. The powerful man was now an elderly man with elderly concerns.
As I stepped out of the car, he said behind me, “I’ll always remember the last time I saw her. Never let that happen to you.”
It was a personal admonishment framed as advice. But it was the worst form of advice—the kind given after it was too late to do anything about it.
I went back to the office and called Detective Ricohr. I was losing sense of why I made the decisions I did other than this one just felt like the right thing to do. I needed to know some things about Jeanette.
He called me back later in the afternoon. He was more cheerful than I anticipated. I had caused this man a lot of grief with my amateurish meddling. I would have swatted me away a long time before, but Detective Ricohr had a far deeper reserve of patience than I ever did.
“There was no evidence of the girl or baby in the building where the killing happened,” he told me after the preamble about how he shouldn’t be telling me this information, that it is still an ongoing investigation, etc. He was probably doing it for the recording machines at police headquarters. “And no evidence of her being at the victim’s condo,” he added, preempting my question.
“What’s the collective view on the kidnapping?”
“There’s some disagreement. Most think she and the Portillo boy were in on it all along, that it was some sort of blackmailing scheme. What they had on the old man no one is really sure. A minority think they were just two dumb kids duped into participating. In both scenarios we think she and the baby are dead. That’s the one area where everyone agrees.”
I thought that through but something didn’t fit.
“You don’t like it,” he stated.
“I am not sure I know enough to like or not like it,” I told him. “But it doesn’t seem right.”
“Not everything ties up into a nice little bow, you know.”
“You’re right,” I agreed, as unappealing as those words were.
“Are you done?” he asked.
“I can’t think of any other questions.”
“No, are you done with the whole thing?” I didn’t know how to answer him. It felt like there was more to do. My internal deliberation gave him his answer. “I didn’t think you would be. This will fall on deaf ears, but don’t be an idiot.”
“I’ll try not to,” I said with a laugh.
“Seriously, don’t be an idiot.”
“That’s sound advice, Detective.”
“Make sure you take it.”
A FAMILIAR SOUND
This time I came prepared.
I parked my car in an open spot fifty yards or so from the house. I brought food and water to last for some indeterminate length of time, enough backlogged newspapers to occupy my mind, and a blanket and pillow, although I didn’t end up using the latter. For a day and a half I stewed in my car in the merciless heat and picked at the flaw in the consensus thinking around the blackmailing scheme. If Jeanette and Nelson were complicit, wittingly or unwittingly, why would she be the only one who had to lose her life?
In the time outside his house, I never saw Nelson but that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of activity. It mostly revolved around Nelson’s brother, often accompanied by his grandmother but sometimes alone, coming and going from the house on an endless stream of errands, most of the time returning with arms laden with giant shopping bags of unknown contents.
Things settled down in the evening. The lights
burned behind the curtains for so long that I thought no one ever turned them off. They eventually went dark sometime after midnight and stayed dark until a brief moment in the early hours when a light from somewhere deep in the house clicked on. The faint yellow spoke of insomnia or thirst or something else. It didn’t last long and the house remained dark for the rest of the night.
I never went to sleep. I turned the car on once or twice to pump some heat into the cabin and to activate the wipers to clear the accumulation of dew from the front windshield. The city was remarkably still in those few hours before sunrise. A beautiful sun eventually inched its way in between the houses and lit up the side of my face. The wonderfully sad pink of an early Sunday morning spread over the neighborhood.
I watched the abuelita waddle out in a floral print dress and fake pearls and purse heavy with the words of God. Her son, reluctantly “dressed up” in black slacks and a white T-shirt, trailed behind her at a distance that conveyed a preference for doing something else with his free morning. I checked my watch—quarter to nine. Fifteen minutes until the service began. I placed a quick call, gave it a few minutes in case they returned home for some forgotten donation envelope, then got out of my car and pushed my stiff legs to the front door of the house.
My knock rattled the metal door like tin plates used to scare crows out of a cornfield. I didn’t think Nelson would run but the delay in answering the door led me to doubt that assumption. Just as I was about to loop around the back, the door opened and the kid stood there looking disheveled and sleepy-eyed. He still had his pajamas on. I gently brushed past him before he marshaled any form of defiance. There was an unmistakable smell lingering in the air, something sour. I helped myself to the couch with the overworked springs. Nelson remained by the door, his hand still on the knob.
“Hey, what are you doing?” he started three seconds too late because I was already seated and had no intention of leaving. “You can’t come in here. You’ll wake everyone up.”
“They already left for church,” I told him.
“Oh,” he said, looking around like someone trying to get his bearings.
“Why don’t you sit down,” I instructed. “I have a couple of questions for you.”
“I already talked to the police.”
He came and sat opposite me anyway.
“I know. I want you to talk to me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I asked you to.” I spied one of the shopping bags in the corner. “What’s all that?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, looking annoyed.
“Mind if I take a look?” I had no intention of getting up, but Nelson did and made a move to intercept me. It was the fastest I had ever seen him move. “Must be something important.”
“What do you want?” he asked. He was getting his legs under him and stood over me in as threatening a pose as he could probably ever muster.
“Can you tell her to come out, please?”
“What?”
“Come on, kid, stop screwing around and tell her to come out here so we can all talk.”
“She’s not even here,” he tried. “I don’t know where she is.”
“It’s okay,” said a soft voice.
Jeanette stood at the edge of the hallway. She wore a nightgown that looked borrowed from an old woman and probably was. Her hair was loosely pulled together in a band and rested limply on her shoulder. Her eyes were heavy from interrupted sleep and spoke of a mother’s weariness. Even her voice, made deeper from having just awoken, added on a few years.
“You’re the man working for my grandfather?”
She was the only one who questioned my temporary job whose gaze didn’t include a judgment with it.
“Right now, I only work for a faceless corporation. But yes, your grandfather hired me to find you.”
“You found me,” she smiled. “Now what?”
“Let’s talk about it.”
Jeanette joined Nelson on the couch. He took her hand in his to offer support but it was clear in the gesture and in the way she sat there that she was the one providing the support.
“So, tell me the plan.”
Neither wanted to start but I could tell by their shared look that they had thought something out in fairly deep detail. It took some coaxing by me to get it out of them. Jeanette eventually took the helm and explained their next move, and that’s when youth finally revealed itself in all its glorious stupidity.
They had some vague plan involving a cousin in Mexico and fifty grand they thought they were going to get to live off but didn’t. They made it sound a hundred times that because, as they repeatedly reminded me, “Everything is super cheap in Mexico.” Nelson had relatives to help with the baby and they could work and live some simple life and get away from the “meanness of people” in our city. Apparently, only happy, caring people lived south of the border. I let them blabber on because there was something charming about their irrational hope and the total conviction with which they expressed it. They were just a couple of knuckleheads too delusional to see the inanity of a “plan” that didn’t deserve that name.
I led them to believe I would help them so that I could dissuade them from trying it in the first place. And the one thing I knew I needed to do to accomplish that was to not let them out of my sight. I threw out the hundred grand that Valenti had promised me and the idea that if I could collect it, then they could have it to help set up a life in the pueblo. That excited them far more than I thought it would. They latched onto the offer like it was the single solution to all of their troubles. They went so far as to strategize how they could help me get it. Jeanette could meet her grandfather to prove that I fulfilled my duty and then she could escape at a later date. We all agreed this was the best approach, and although I thought it was the dumbest idea ever uttered, I couldn’t help but share in their excitement.
Jeanette got up from the couch and headed back down the hallway toward the bedrooms. Then I heard what her mother’s ears heard before me, the soft gurgling and then the full cries of a hungry baby. Nelson and I continued the planning discussion and worked out the remaining details before we could fully lock it into place.
There was a knock on the door. Nelson went to answer it.
“Where is she?” a voice asked.
I looked over but couldn’t see who it was.
“She’s here,” the voice declared. “I know she’s here. The lady told me.”
As I went over to investigate, I watched a hand reach in and push Nelson back into the room. Sami stepped through the doorframe. He kept one hand on Nelson’s chest. The other held a rusty hammer that he let dangle by his side.
“Whoever you’re looking for isn’t here,” I said but it didn’t seem to matter.
Sami closed the door behind him and locked it.
“Where is she?” he asked again.
No reply could get him to stop asking the question. There was a serenity and distance in his eyes that was more unnerving than when I first stood under his penetrating gaze. He was talking to us but you got the sense he didn’t even realize there were humans in the room with him.
I slowly moved in between Sami and Nelson, and even more importantly, between Sami and the back room where Jeanette and the baby were. It felt like the slightest of movements would upset whatever precarious balance Sami held in the doorway. I had to somehow get him out of the house, but having no physical skill to do that, I just tried talking him out. The words were meaningless; it was more the steady, lulling cadence that allowed me to creep toward the door.
Sami opened up his stance, just a little, but the meaning of the gesture was there—he considered letting me pass. I walked into the opening and crossed within striking distance of the hammer. I felt somewhat confident he was going to let me by but I couldn’t really be sure. And the thought that I now had my back to him made me even more on edge, as a blow from that hammer to the back of my head could come without warning at any moment.
The lock moved easily under my thumb. I reached for the handle and slowly swung the door open.
“Let’s talk outside,” I said softly. Sami started to lean in my direction. “We’ll be better when we talk out here.”
He looked up at me and I believed I was finally starting to get through to him. His eyes had a flicker of life in them, a spark of engagement. His leg swung around and took its first hesitant step toward me.
Then that sound again from deep in the house. I heard it first. I watched Sami’s right eye narrow like he was trying to reconcile the distant gurgle with the people in the room. Confusion crossed his face as he couldn’t quite put it all together. I filled the silence with my dithering, just spilling out nonsensical words, anything at all to mask the sounds and distract his attention from what was emanating from the back of the house. It didn’t work. The unmistakable cries of a newborn filled the room. Sami’s head snapped around and his body followed with cold, sleek precision as he calmly walked in the direction of the baby’s sounds.
I ran after him. It was the only time in my life that I just acted. I caught him outside Nelson’s bedroom and threw my body into his backside. We toppled to the floor, and I rolled off his back and into the hallway wall. I reached out for the arm with the hammer and grabbed what I could. He jerked his arm back and freed himself from my grip but he also lost his balance and fell back into the opposite wall. Jeanette’s screams filled the narrow space. Nelson came bounding down the hall. I barked an order but he was already ahead of me, dashed into the room with Jeanette and the baby, and slammed the door shut. The room was the only source of light in the hallway and the closed door cast a near darkness between me and Sami. I didn’t wait. I threw myself forward to the spot where I thought he was. I felt a hard wall but I also got a piece of soft flesh. I clawed at it and anything I could. I felt something warm and moist which might have been his eyes. He wriggled underneath me. I tried to make myself as heavy as possible to keep him down. There was a loud thud and I found myself letting out an airless cough. My back suddenly felt hot and tingly. I gasped for a breath of air and although all the components for breathing were in motion, no air came in.
The Perpetual Summer Page 20