“Don’t worry, he can wait a little longer,” I told her and headed towards my office before Hector saw me.
“But Mr. Restic, he said it was quite important that he speak to you. He’ll be out of the restroom shortly,” she explained.
“Restroom? Who are you talking about?”
“Sorry about that,” a voice boomed behind me. “Bacon hot dog didn’t sit right with me.”
Detective Ricohr waddled his way towards us. His voice brought Hector out of his hypnotic state and he too came in my direction. The four of us stood there staring at each other. I spoke first.
“What brings you here, detective?” I asked.
Hector pulled a bank move straight out of the Blue Angels playbook. He quickly retreated out the glass doors towards the elevator banks.
“I didn’t catch your name,” Detective Ricohr called out after him.
“Hector,” the old magician shot back.
“Hector what?”
“Just Hector,” he answered and disappeared into the elevator car.
“Just Hector,” the detective laughed.
I gestured empathetically to his area of suffering. “I see your feet are still bothering you.”
“And I thought I was getting better,” he replied and looked around. “Should we go to your office?”
“We should be good here,” I replied.
My assistant didn’t want to intrude and excused herself. She wasn’t more than a few feet away when Detective Ricohr threw his first question out.
“So what do you know about Jeanette Schwartzman?”
It was a cheap tactic to get a visceral reaction from me. I was familiar enough with the detective to not fall for it.
“I know of her,” I answered, “but I have never met her.”
“Carl Valenti’s granddaughter, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“I didn’t think you liked that man,” he said.
Detective Ricohr was well aware of my feelings towards Valenti. He investigated the murder of my friend, a murder that I believed Valenti was connected to. It turned out not to be true, but that didn’t completely absolve him.
“I don’t like him,” I answered.
“But things change,” he finished for me. “Want to fill me in on what that could be.”
“I’m helping him with a personal matter. With his granddaughter.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to her?” he asked.
“I haven’t.”
“So she’s missing. That’s interesting.” He wrote something in his notepad that took far longer to write than anything I had yet told him. “We found your number on a cell phone belonging to a murder victim — Morgan McIlroy. Young girl, blonde?”
It took a moment for it to register. And when it finally did it was like the oxygen was being pulled from my lungs. I think I might have taken a slight step backwards.
“You’re not going to faint, are you?”
“I know Morgan. I mean, I met her once,” I felt the need to clarify not because I wanted to avoid suspicion but because there was a sudden distance between me and the young girl that somehow warranted an impersonal tone. Detective Ricohr continued with the theme of detachment.
“She was strangled, dumped in a car in a parking lot in Chinatown. We’re checking security cameras to see if we can get a shot of the killer,” he added matter-of-factly.
I recalled my encounter with the precocious girl at the burger stand. Only when I summoned an image of the young girl — sitting there in the booth eating my fries and doing her best to answer my questions — did it finally strike me that she was dead.
“Jesus,” I breathed. “We just met the other day.”
“Want to fill me in on what you talked about?”
I hesitated.
“It was in reference to the other thing I talked about with Valenti. But I shouldn’t say anything more until I can talk to the family.”
“It sounds like they could be connected.”
“I wouldn’t want to speculate,” I said.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” he responded. As he turned to leave he requested that I call him as soon as I talked to the old man. And he had some unsolicited advice for me.
“If you didn’t trust him before, I don’t know why you would trust him now.”
HIGH NOON
“There he is!” he shouted as I entered.
Badger’s office was half of the ground floor of a three story apartment building located on a side street in Echo Park. The only evidence that it was an actual office was a hand-written sign on poster board pasted in the upper corner of the large picture window facing the sidewalk.
The carpet was a deep gold made deeper by the years of foot traffic from shoes comfortable walking on dusty streets. Its edges didn’t cleanly fit with the wall and was probably a cast-off from another office undergoing an update. There was little furniture outside of a desk, filing cabinet, and a bookcase that looked like surplus from a 1970s schoolroom. I didn’t spot a computer. The only attempt at decoration was a cloudy vase of dried pussy willows and a borrowed frame displaying Badger’s private investigator credentials.
The one question that sprang to mind as I took in the surroundings, a question that I needed to address as soon as I got back to the office, was Who the hell did the background check on the background checker?
“Chuck,” he said, rising from his desk, “good to finally meet you in person.”
Badger was one of those guys who tucked his sweater into his jeans and didn’t wear a belt. He had a handshake that could crack walnuts and his skin was about as rough as the broken shells. His hair was the color and texture of dirty straw and I couldn’t tell if all of it was real.
“Thanks for making this a priority,” I told him and took a seat in a creaky chair. Behind Badger’s desk, a makeshift wall and curtained doorway separated the front of the office from a back room. Over his shoulder and through the slat in the curtain, I spotted an Army cot, mini-fridge, and hotplate. This was what savvy real estate agents would deem a “mixed-use” space.
“You’ll always be the priority,” he told me. I pitied the utterly unimportant person who wasn’t the recipient of this phrase because, as far as I could tell, he said it to everyone.
“I found some things,” he stated firmly. “Let us begin.”
I marveled at the lack of paper in the entire exchange. The only sign of paper anywhere in the office was a yellow newspaper on his desk that looked a decade from being current. If this was a corporate meeting, he’d have a thirty-five page flipbook with the first third filled with table of contents, title dividers, biographies of the participants, and other such nonsense. There would also be an appendix that you would be instructed to “read at your leisure.” Somewhere in the middle of this mess would be the actual meat of the presentation that could be boiled down to a few, succinct bullets. The only way to hear them was to endure a long presentation by the person who put it together. That was why every meeting in corporate America is at least one hour long. Badger wouldn’t make it in that world.
“In 1963 Hector Hermosillo was arrested and charged with the stabbing death of a teenager in the Alpine district. He was twenty-two at the time. The police arrested him at the scene without incident.”
“Knife fight,” I repeated.
“One of them had a knife, anyway. The police put it down as a racial dispute, perhaps gang related. There was concern that it could boil over to another race riot and put a lot of men on the streets.”
Los Angeles at that time was a bit of a powder keg as the city began to resemble the ethnically-diverse mish-mash that it is today. Friction between the various groups — blacks, Mexicans, Japanese, whites, Chinese — jostling for space and jobs and respect sometimes flared up into full-on melees. These resulted in many deaths but never much will to change the things that led to them.