“The Barnacle thinks he’s so clever,” he laughed. I assumed he was referring to his former kin. “He still hasn’t learned who he is dealing with.”
“Is your granddaughter’s disappearance somehow connected to the museum?” I wanted to bring us back to the issue at hand.
“That’s why I am potentially paying you,” he shot back. “To find out.” I let him calm down a minute by remaining quiet. He busied himself with the coals and readjusted the plank that kept him from burning his ass on the bench. “There’s one other thing. There was a note.”
“What kind of note?” I asked.
“An email asking for money.” He sounded ashamed.
“From your granddaughter?”
He nodded.
“What did it say?”
“It just asked for money.”
“What’d you do?”
“What do you think I did?” he asked back. “I paid it.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” he concluded.
“How do you know it was legitimate?”
“It was legitimate.”
“How can you be sure it wasn’t someone posing as your granddaughter?”
“The email was sent to an account that only Jeanette has the address for. I set it up just for her.”
“I’d like to see the email.”
“I have a copy for you downstairs in the car. There is a full packet there for you to look through.” I was curious why he didn’t bother to bring it up. “My driver will give you full access to my properties to do whatever you need to do.”
“Your driver? I don’t understand.”
“Hector will take you wherever you need to go.”
“I have a car, Mr. Valenti.”
“Hector is a condition of the offer,” he stated firmly.
“I wasn’t aware I needed a chaperone.”
“It’s not up for negotiation.”
***
The front door of the town car was locked and Valenti’s driver made no effort to do anything about it so I settled in upon the creaking leather in the back seat. As we pulled out onto Figueroa, I anxiously looked back towards the Club and wondered what would become of my car sitting in the garage down below.
“I’m Chuck,” I said to the back of the shiny black head.
I got no response.
“You’re Hector, right?”
There was no acknowledgement on his end.
“Don’t worry, I’m not much of a conversationalist either,” I told him and asked that he take me to the girl’s home. At least I knew he was listening to me because we banked three lanes over towards the entrance to the 110.
I wanted to talk to the girl’s family and perhaps look around her house for some insights into why she left. What exactly I was going to look for when I got there was a mystery but it felt like the correct thing to do. Sitting on the seat next to me was the folder Valenti referenced which contained various bits of information, including the email Valenti received from his granddaughter:
Need $45,000. Don’t ask why.
Am in trouble. —J
I had already worked an unflattering image of Jeanette in my head, and this email confirmed it. I pictured a wild young girl, coming into her own with more money than most would see in their lifetime, living an entitled life of private schools in Beverly Hills and vacation homes that followed the seasons. The ambiguous way Valenti described her led me to believe she had already amassed a cemetery’s worth of skeletons that he was both ashamed of and frightened of, as they threatened the realization of his museum. I imagined an over-sexed waif landing herself in some dire financial situation that was both inevitable and doomed to be repeated because of the bottomless reserve of funds always there to bail her out. In a very short while I came to resent this little brat. That is, until I came upon her photo.
The over-sexed waif was actually a frumpy, unassuming girl of fourteen who looked painfully uncomfortable in her own skin. It was a simple photograph overlooking the ocean — most likely Hawaii — with a smiling and casually-dressed Valenti with his arm draped around Jeannette’s shoulder. Everything about her was embarrassed, like the camera lens was the glare of a thousand suns whose sole purpose was to illuminate all of her faults. She angled her body in a way to spare it the uncompromising reality of the photograph. She tucked in her chin and offered up a sideways half-smile to hide its imperfections. With one leg bent behind her, she appeared to be nervously grinding her toes into the sand and would have crawled into the indentation in the earth if she could.
The town car merged onto the 405 and headed north a short way, exiting before we hit the pass. We turned off the main drag and started weaving our way up into the residential area of Brentwood. The houses here weren’t audacious but they came at audacious prices. Many were colonial revivals or renovated ranches. We stopped in front of a contemporary structure made of burnished steel, thick panes of glass, and strategically-placed planks of blonde wood. The yard was small and immaculate. Not a single stray leaf blotted the walkway up to the front door.
Hector silently led the way to the entrance. He rang the doorbell and no more than five seconds passed before he took out a ring of keys and inserted one into the lock.
“What are you doing?” I asked, dismayed that he felt it in his right to open the door to someone else’s home.
“You wanted to see the girl’s room,” he explained.
“Yes, but we can’t just barge into a stranger’s house without their knowing.”
“This is Mr. Valenti’s house,” he corrected. “His daughter lives here.” The nuance of his answer was telling. I’d watched enough British television series to know that the servants often spoke the language of their bosses.
I trailed him into the foyer. It was an open-concept room with a bank of windows that looked out over the lower half of one of the many canyons in the neighborhood. The furniture looked expensive and uncomfortable. To the left were the kitchen and public areas. To the right looked to be the bedrooms.
“You want to see her room?” he asked and led me that way before waiting for a reply.
“Are you sure this is okay to be snooping around?” I called after him, but he ignored me.
I followed Hector down a hallway lined with artwork but no personal photographs. The other wall was all glass and gave the illusion that you were outside. Several yards away was a stationary lap pool. Somewhere in the white froth was a swimmer beating futilely against a jet-propelled current.
Hector stood outside a door to one of the rooms and gestured inside. Like the guide who brings you to the altar of the holy temple, he was willing to point it out but he was going to let me desecrate it all by myself. I stood outside the room and fought off the feelings of creepiness that came with a middle-aged man skulking around a young teen’s bedroom.
A mish-mash of pastel purples and greens and frilly pillows, it was smaller than I would have imagined the daughter of the daughter of a billionaire would have. I gingerly stepped into the room and did a quick scan. By the time my eyes got back to the doorway, Hector had disappeared. I wanted to join him.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. A gnawing regret at having taken the assignment grew into a deeper regret that I was fooling with someone’s life. Maybe this was all just a troubled girl going through a difficult stage, but it very well could have been something more serious, and I was playing games purely out of boredom. One hour into the job, I was already ready to quit.
A slippery figure in white slid by the door. Seconds later it backed up and paused in the entrance to study the strange man in the young girl’s bedroom.