By the time I got back to the office, most of the people had left, trying to catch the early trains back to Orange County. I passed by Bob’s empty office. You can say this much — the machine certainly was efficient in eradicating cancerous cells from the corporate ecosystem. His office was completely wiped clean of belongings and no trace remained of the man who had given forty-plus years of his life to the company. Except for one thing — the row of crystal trophies, the culmination of a career, that spanned the wall-to-wall shelf above his desk. They were that constant North Star of accomplishment that I gazed at during our weekly touch base meetings. But I couldn’t figure out why they had left the awards when they had clearly shipped back everything else, including the pencils.
I pulled his desk chair over and climbed up to reach for one of the statuettes. It was a heavy obelisk with a granite base. The crystal was a little dusty but I could clearly read the etched words next to my fingers:
“YOUR NAME HERE”
They were samples from various corporate-appreciation gift companies but displayed like the trophies of a grand master. Bob said he only recently came to the conclusion that his life spent here was meaningless. But it was clear he came to that conclusion long before that.
ONE CONDITION
There comes a point in life when people simply stop evolving. They settle on the haircut they will get for the rest of their lives, the wardrobe that will never get updated, the speech that defies the passing eras. The Coverdale Club reached that point forty years ago.
The paneled dining room was empty except for a few dusty old-timers enjoying the most popular appetizer in the house — double rye Manhattans. Audubon and fox hunting prints decorated the walls and harkened a simple, more bucolic life full of nature and slaughter. A tuxedoed waiter, clutching a leather-bound menu, padded across the burgundy carpet but he needn’t have gone through the trouble as I could have guessed the menu’s contents without looking — salad of iceberg lettuce wedges and bleu cheese dressing, London Broil, potato dauphine, and thick asparagus with hollandaise, all washed down with a ruby claret.
“Good afternoon,” the elderly waiter intoned. “May I inquire whose guest you are gracing us as today?”
He apparently was familiar with the entire member roster to know that I didn’t belong to the club, although that feat wasn’t too impressive since I was the only person under sixty in the entire place. He watched me make one last scan of the dining room.
“Are you meeting a member?” asked the voice with a growing sense of annoyance.
“Yes,” I answered. “Carl Valenti.”
The osteoporosis posture suddenly became a little straighter and the voice became a little more helpful. For a name that normally drew my ire, this time it actually felt good to say it. The man eagerly led me to a small elevator with another vestige of the past, a human operator. The directory called out the gymnasium, a lyceum for guest speakers, and then “residences” at the top which was code for rooms to entertain young women on the make. They also served as actual residences when the young woman gets you kicked out of your mansion in San Marino. We got off at the floor with the gym.
I was led into a room lined with mahogany lockers and covered in hunter green carpet that smelled of laudanum and foot powder. The room was full of big, white bellies in towels and older black men who waited on them. It echoed an unpleasant “yes’um” era when blacks served as the backbone of the service industry in Los Angeles.
I followed the attendant into one of the saunas hidden behind a groaning, wooden door. Valenti was the only occupant. He sat hunched forward on one of the benches. He had old man skin, like an over-stretched sweater, with rivulets of sweat running through the folds. The door thudded shut as the attendant left us alone.
“Do you want to talk outside?” I asked. I was already sweating and clearly not dressed for the occasion.
“It’s quieter in here,” he answered.
“Okay,” I said. “How should we start?”
“You tell me. You’re the investigator.”
The man clearly never missed an opportunity to needle.
“No, I’m not an investigator,” I said, loosening the collar of my shirt. “But maybe that’s where we should start. Tell me why you didn’t hire a real one.”
“I’ve worked with private investigators in the past. They are nothing more than blackmailers in disguise. I can’t invite that sort of temptation into this.”
“What would they be tempted with, Mr. Valenti?”
He didn’t like that question.
“Every family has its unseemly side. Mine is no different. I’d rather not have that be exploited.”
“Tell me about your granddaughter.”
“There’s nothing unseemly about her,” he snapped.
“I didn’t ask for the dirt on her,” I corrected, though now it made me think I should have. “I was just asking for some general information.”
Valenti spent the next five minutes describing his only grandchild. Jeanette was the daughter of Meredith Schwartzman, his only child through a second marriage. The girl lived with her mother who was permanently separated from her husband. He talked about the missing girl like a proud grandfather but he relayed the information with a reporter’s distance. The words matched but the tone didn’t.
I did a stint in recruiting before my current role with the firm. There I developed an invaluable skill called the Bullshit Detector. Over the last two decades, résumés had become so bloated with fluff and jargon that it became nearly impossible to discern what someone actually did in their past roles.
“Facilitated discussions among teams of senior managers…”
“Liaison for strategic external clients…”
“Workflow oversight of core content deliverables…”
Like those red lens glasses that kids use to find the secret word, the Bullshit Detector allowed you to see through the spin and get to the heart of what someone did.
“Scheduled meetings.”
“Answered phones.”
“Did nothing.”
There was so much nonsense coming out of Valenti’s mouth that I had to shut off the detector for fear of it overheating. My head swirled in the maddening array of evasive answers and half-truths. Or it could have been the fact that the room was a hundred and eighty degrees and I was wearing wool. Thankfully the attendant came in and poured another ladle of water on the hot stones.
“Your granddaughter is fourteen years old. Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked.
“There was a time when you could own the police,” he lamented, “but now you have to own the union to own the police and that is too expensive a proposition. They have an insatiable appetite. I don’t want the publicity that comes with an official investigation.”
“It’s your granddaughter,” I said flatly.
Valenti didn’t appreciate the recrimination in that statement.
“I know it means nothing to you but that museum means a lot to me.” It was the first thing he said that I actually believed. “The building won’t go up without a fight. There are a lot of people who would like to see me fail. Do you know about the ballot initiative?”
I remembered reading about a local proposition sponsored by the offspring of one of Chinatown’s scions. It was an innocuous-sounding change to a certain cultural heritage provision which was in reality a thinly-disguised maneuver to block the construction of Valenti’s art museum. It was a bit of a local scandal because one of the sponsors of the proposition was none other than the art foundation that Valenti founded and would use to populate the museum itself. Adding to the controversy was the fact that the person leading the charge was the head of the foundation, Valenti’s own estranged son-in-law.