He was a broken man who didn’t want to admit it, someone who salved his wounds by taking on an air of aloofness to show how little the old man’s needling bothered him. He heroically played the part of the soldier in the old movies who tells his buddy he’s fine even though everyone around him knows the gut shot is fatal.
“I’ll tell you a good one,” he chuckled. “When it came time for my fortieth birthday, he gave me a thick envelope, letter-sized. In it was a copy of his will.” He looked to me for some kind of reaction but got none. “It was his way of telling me that I wasn’t in it. What a piece of work, right?” We shared a good laugh. Or, he laughed and I watched him.
“About your daughter,” I reminded him.
Again he waved me off and let the laughter draw out to its unnatural conclusion.
“I’ll call her this evening and tell her to come home,” as if it was as easy as a ten second phone call.
“Mr. Valenti believes this could be something serious—”
“Uh-huh.”
“—enough that he has hired me to find her.”
“Look, I don’t judge you,” he told me magnanimously.
“I appreciate it,” I said, although suddenly the tone was no longer among equals.
“You have a living to earn and I don’t begrudge it. Heck, I’ll even help you get your money. But you don’t know the old man. This isn’t about my daughter.”
“What is it about, then?”
“What it’s always about — getting what he wants.” Schwartzman was starting to look a little off-balanced. “He wants this museum,” he slurred. “He’ll do anything to get it. You can’t put anything past him.”
The whole thing seemed wildly implausible. But then again this was a wildly implausible family. There was a missing teenager, a worried grandfather with potentially ulterior motives for having her found, and two parents who couldn’t be bothered to care.
“Is your daughter close to her grandfather?”
“He’s a very persuasive man,” he answered.
I got more details from Schwartzman about his daughter’s friends than I got from her mother. I asked him to call me as soon as he heard from Jeanette and I promised to do the same if I learned anything new. He walked me out of the office and even felt equals enough to put his arm around me.
“Tell me something,” he said, pausing by the receptionist’s desk. “Did he use my name when you spoke?”
“Who? Mr. Valenti?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t really remember, Mr. Schwartzman.”
“You don’t have to be polite. I know he called me ‘The Barnacle’. It’s okay, I like it,” he reassured. “It’s rather appropriate.”
“Why’s that?” I asked casually.
“Because it’ll take dynamite to get me off this ship,” he said defiantly.
Hector was waiting in the downstairs lobby and opened the door for me as I approached. I paused to let a young Asian man coming in the opposite direction go first. Just as the man crossed the threshold I saw Hector flick the door just enough to close the gap between the door and the jam. The move knocked the man off balance, and he stumbled into the lobby.
“Asshole,” he sneered at an emotionless Hector.
I looked at Hector, still holding the door open for me but decided to exit through the other bank.
***
We stopped at a burger place on Pico not far from Schwartzman’s office. We ordered from separate lines and ate at separate tables. He never looked in my direction, but I watched him.
He consumed his meal with the methodical approach of someone who ate for nourishment, not for pleasure. On the surface, he gave off the image of an old man oblivious to all the things going on around him. A screaming baby to his right got not so much as a glance. A homeless man asking for money received even less attention. He ate his entire meal with a dab of mayonnaise on his moustache, a white dot on a black canvas that I could see from a good twenty feet away. Yet all the while I felt like he was watching everything in great detail.
He saw her before I did.
Morgan McIlroy turned her nose up at the modest establishment. She kept both her arms in tight to her body as if letting them wander would expose them to unknown amounts of germs. I looked past her to the parking lot and saw the Mercedes and two girlfriends waiting for her. They wanted no part of the burger place.
Hector led her over to my table and wordlessly asked her to sit. I was worried that our meeting would put her on edge — so worried that I had Jeff call her parents first to provide the introduction. But my concern was unwarranted because Morgan wasn’t bothered in the least. There was an undeserved confidence in the way she casually sat with an adult stranger. She leaned back in the booth and pulled one leg up so her knee could serve as a place to rest her chin. She was around Jeanette’s age, maybe a little older, but they couldn’t have been more different. She was the over-sexed waif I imagined Valenti’s granddaughter to be.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” I began.
“Sure, but I don’t think I can help,” she replied. She studied the remains of my half-eaten meal with her lip slightly curled. “I mean, we’re not like friends or anything.”
“Well, we’re just trying to find out as much information as we can. How long have you known her?”
“Maybe five years. Our parents are friends,” she added.
Morgan was confirming my suspicions that Jeanette was a lonely kid whose interactions with others came mainly through her family.
“Do you know a boy named Nelson something?”
“Portillo? Yeah, he goes to my school.” Then she added, “They give scholarships to families with challenging economic means.”
It was a talking point straight out of the school’s PR campaign but despite the altruistic core of the words in the sentence there was still an air of snobbery by the person delivering it.
“So Jeanette and Nelson were friends?”
“Yeah, they’re close.”
“Are they dating?” I probed.
“I guess so.”
“Do you know his number?”
Morgan tapped away on her phone and tracked down his cell. I copied the number down.
“What about a home address?” I asked.
“One of my friends is in art class with him,” she explained. “She probably has it,” and before she finished the sentence she was sending a text asking for the address. “Jeanette did text me recently,” she said almost like an afterthought.
“She did? When?”
“I don’t know. About three weeks ago.” Morgan again eyed my fries but this time she started eating them. She scowled at the first bite but that didn’t stop her from motoring through the rest of them. “She asked for money,” said the girl with a mouthful of food.
“Do you still have the text?”
“Yeah,” she answered and began scrolling through her old texts. “It was for some sick amount of money, like thirty thousand dollars or something.” She spent the next five minutes looking for it and handed her phone over to show me.
It was a long text that rambled through a half-apology and then a request for money for something she couldn’t say. The amount requested was the same she asked of Valenti by email. I noted the date and time but my memory told me it was shortly after the same request went to her grandfather. There was an address listed where Morgan was to bring the money. I wrote that down and heard Morgan snicker.
“It’d be easier if I just forwarded the text to you.”
“I’m the old-fashioned kind,” I said. I read through the text a few more times but didn’t glean anything more. “It doesn’t look like you responded.”