I interrupted her efforts. “Excuse me, is there a way I could leave a small gratuity for the staff for taking such great care of my aunt?” I asked.
“Why that is very thoughtful of you,” the woman beamed.
“I’d like to leave it for the attendant I asked about earlier.”
The beam got a little duller.
“Oh, okay. Well, you can leave it with me.”
I took some of the cash I had on me to bribe the gossip blogger and started to hand it to the woman, but then had second thoughts and awkwardly pulled the bills back.
“Maybe I should just write a check,” I said to the woman.
“However you prefer,” she said icily.
“Tala…” I said. “…what was her last name again?”
SOCIALIZATION
The coincidences were too numerous to justify using that word anymore. People and places were integrally linked in a knotted mess that I had little hope I could ever untangle. I decided to focus on the connection of the nurse at the convalescent home. The fact that she hadn’t shown up for work in days without an excuse was further proof that something was amiss. Still to be decided was whether she was coercing Jeanette or in collusion with her. Either way, I knew if I found Tala, I would find a path to Jeanette.
I gave the job to Badger. With my interview fast approaching, I couldn’t risk pulling a disappearing act at work. Presence was an important quality for senior leadership and an empty office was not the ideal way to foment an image of serious engagement in my work. And although the interviews would grant me ample time to meet and discuss my qualities and ideas with the decision-makers, there was a necessary pre-step I had to take if I had any chance of succeeding.
“Socialization” was the new buzzword at the office. With so many new ideas and initiatives being pitched at once and so little mental “bandwidth” (and will) to process them all, leadership demanded they hear about each pitch on an individual basis before the actual meeting. The reason was clear: no one liked to be taken by surprise. This resulted in a mini-campaign of sorts, often off the calendar, where you were expected to make the rounds to the various offices of the decision-makers for a quick “drop in” chat. You’d float the idea, get some initial feedback, and then agree that it would be good to discuss in the larger group. In the military world, this was known as “softening up the hill.” In the corporate world, it was how people filled up their calendars. One meeting with ten people quickly became eleven meetings when you added in all of the individual ones.
I was so busy running around on my socialization work that I missed the breaking story — Nelson Portillo was wanted for questioning in the murder of Morgan McIlroy. She was apparently last seen with him leaving a restaurant in Silver Lake. They had a school photo of the Portillo boy and despite the menacing words “Wanted for questioning” emblazoned over it, the kid still didn’t look like he could kill another human being. There was no mention of Jeanette in any of the articles.
I foolishly put a call in to Detective Ricohr and unfortunately for me he picked up.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Restic? Do you want to confess?”
“No, but you have the wrong person in the Portillo boy.”
“Now why would you know anything about that?” he asked, surprised. “Maybe you should be a person of interest in the girl’s murder.”
I hadn’t thought through the phone call and was now getting myself entangled in a difficult situation. Previously, when I met with Detective Ricohr, I was not forthcoming with the details around Jeanette’s disappearance because of some vague notion of client privilege, if there even was such a thing. But now having been summarily dismissed from my role as private investigator, so too was I released from any obligations to Valenti and his precious privacy.
“I may not have given you all of the facts when we first met,” I confessed.
“I’m sure of it. Care to make amends?”
I told him what I knew — most of it, anyway. I explained the reason for meeting with Morgan in the first place and was clear the missing girl I was after was in fact, Valenti’s granddaughter.
“You have a way of tangling with some pretty powerful people,” he commented but it sounded more like a warning than anything else.
I purposely avoided mentioning the original payment Hector made to Nelson’s brother. I knew how quickly this would be misinterpreted as further proof of Nelson’s potential guilt. And I conveniently left out the part where Nelson tried to run me over and the time he tried to escape out the window and then stood me up in the Rally’s parking lot. Reviewing all of the stuff I left out of the narrative made me half-wonder if Nelson should be a suspect after all.
The other big piece that was conveniently left out of what I told Detective Ricohr was any mention of Hector Hermosillo — the knife fight in the street and the prior arrest for murder in 1963. From what I knew about Detective Ricohr, he wasn’t your typical cop. He was a pragmatist and didn’t follow the easy route. But despite all that, I withheld the details about Hector because reasonable or not, cops tended to latch onto things and not let go. The last thing I wanted was the full weight of the Los Angeles Police Department to come down on my little magician friend. He didn’t deserve that kind of treatment.
“I’m only telling you all this because I have met with the Portillo boy and there simply isn’t any way he could have done what you are saying.”
“I never said he did,” Ricohr corrected me.
“Come on, Detective, his face is plastered all over the news. No one is going to split hairs when they see his mug in connection with the girl’s murder. Right now, in the eyes of the public he is already guilty and it’s only a matter of bringing him in for his punishment.”
“You can’t base police work on a ‘feeling’ someone has for a suspect after meeting them for five minutes,” he chided but his heart clearly wasn’t in it. He was a decent soul and he was a better detective. “So you think the girl’s murder is connected to the disappearance of the Valenti girl?”
“I do. There’s something deep running under all of this that I haven’t yet figured out. It could be about money.”
“It often is. This Gao Li — he sounds pretty motivated to get back at the old man.”
“Very motivated. His family hasn’t had the best of experiences with Valenti, to say the least. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Most people who do deal with Valenti come out on the short end.”
There was a short pause.
“You still holding some anger towards the old man?” he asked me straight out.
“I may hate the man,” I told him, “but not enough to do what you’re implying.”
My word seemed enough for him and he let it go.
“Why hasn’t the family contacted the police?”
“Publicity.”
“That sounds thin,” he ruminated.
“Or selfish.”
“Or both. I could alert my colleagues in Missing Persons, if you think that would help. We don’t necessarily need the family to file a report if we think the girl is in danger, but it doesn’t make it easy without the family’s involvement. Especially this family,” he added.
I reasoned that it might do more harm than good. I didn’t want to spook Jeanette by having her face plastered all over the news along with Nelson’s and provoke her into doing something drastic.
“I’m glad you said that,” he admitted. “Seven years from retirement and the last thing I need is to get run out before I’ve reached the eighty percent mark.” Detective Ricohr and I shared the golden handcuffs also known as a “secure retirement.”