“Sit down,” I instructed. “You’re making me nervous.” Hector shot me a look but eventually took a seat on the couch. “What do you think about this?”
“I don’t know. It’s not my business.”
“Then why did you come here to tell me about it?”
“I thought you would want to know.”
That reason made little sense. He had already pushed the limits of his relationship with Valenti when we were working together, but the act of coming to my house smashed all of those limits in one stroke. He was betraying the confidence of the family to someone whom his boss had dismissed. Valenti valued privacy above almost anything and this impropriety would have repercussions beyond Hector’s mere dismissal from the job he’d held for nearly fifty years.
“You know something that you’re not telling me.”
“I’m not lying.”
“I know you aren’t but you’re also not telling me everything. You’re concerned about something. Otherwise, you would never have come all this way in the middle of the night. What is it?”
“I told you everything.”
“When are they supposed to pay it?” I asked.
“Tomorrow night. We’re gonna get the instructions tomorrow in the morning on where to bring the money.” Hector paused a moment. “I’ll be delivering it.”
“Is the family bringing in the police?”
“No,” he answered but it didn’t sound like he agreed with that decision. From my limited time with Hector, I never got the sense that he was a card-carrying member of the Police Benevolence Society. He was a man who preferred to settle his own disputes in a manner of his choosing. The fact that he had some misgivings about leaving the police out hinted further that he was concerned about something.
“Are you worried what might happen to you tomorrow?”
Hector shifted in his seat into an even more upright position.
“I can handle myself,” he said coolly.
“Then what is it?”
“I think she’s dead.”
The words hit me hard. It was one of those conclusions you ruled out because internally you weren’t prepared for it.
“Why do you think that?” I wanted Hector to defend his opinion so I could shoot it down.
“I saw the email,” he admitted and stared at the floor. “They printed a copy and left it on the desk. I shouldn’t have read it.”
“What did it say?” I asked.
“It said that if Mr. Valenti didn’t pay the money that he would never see the baby alive.”
“That’s it?” He nodded, but I didn’t understand how that sentence meant Jeanette was dead. “I would never bring my baby into it,” he explained before I could ask. “A parent doesn’t do that.”
And there I was again, not understanding the realities of being a parent.
“She’s dead,” he stated. As if even his convinced mind wasn’t quite ready to abandon even a trace of hope, he added, “I think.”
“What does the family say?”
“Mr. Valenti is afraid like me.”
“Why do you say that?”
Again there was a hesitation. After decades of subservience, it didn’t come easy to talk so openly about his boss.
“After his daughter left,” he began, “I saw him in his study. He was crying. I never seen him cry, not for anything. It didn’t look like him. He saw me and I thought he’d yell at me or worse, but he just stared and cried. He told me he couldn’t lose them.”
“Do you know who the father of Jeanette’s baby is?” Hector shook his head. “Your boss was very close to his granddaughter, wasn’t he?” It came out crasser than I intended, not that any degree of tact would have mattered because once the allegation registered with Hector, he leapt to his feet and his right hand flicked for his pocket. “Take it easy,” I said. He stared at me with distant eyes. For the first time in our relationship, I was actually afraid of the man. “Hector, listen to me. You didn’t come here because you thought I was out to get the old man. You want to help him and you think I can help you do it. And I’m trying. I want to bring Jeanette home as much as you do and almost as much as Valenti.”
Hector hadn’t moved and it was unclear if any of the things I said had any effect on moving his hand away from the nifty little number in his pocket. I wanted to get him talking.
“If I’m going to help you, I am going to need some answers. You and Valenti have a pretty tight bond — I can see that by the way you defend him. I need to know why.”
The forever-young man with young-man-like reflexes and a younger man’s temperament seemed to dissolve in an instant. I could now see the greys beneath the shoe-polish black. I felt the aches in his lower back. I saw the tired eyes of someone who had seen too much over too many decades.
“I should have died,” he said, but the death he was referring to was not the one I assumed it was.
Hector recounted the events leading up to the night in 1963 when Gao’s uncle lay dead on the street in the Alpine District. To my surprise he came right out and admitted to killing the man. “I stabbed him in the stomach and he didn’t fight any more,” he stated. Hector looked straight at me when he said it. I searched for signs of remorse and found none. But it wasn’t like he was proud of the deed, either. There was a strange detachment from the retelling of the death, a matter-of-factness that escaped my own sensibilities.
The actual events were mundane to the point of being a cliché. Hector was working for the construction company that Valenti owned. It was his first real attempt at a stable earning life. The job was a small development where a corner of a block was being converted into row houses. Hector explained that there were troubles immediately with the job. Their work was periodically vandalized, their supplies constantly delayed, their tools stolen. “That was the worst part,” Hector explained, “because we had to bring our own tools and without your tools you couldn’t work. It cost a lot of money to replace them. It was money out of our pockets.”
Everyone was certain that the younger Li was behind it. It wasn’t much of a secret, as his cronies taunted the workers whenever they could. They often hung around the job site, and sometimes Li himself joined them. There were a few skirmishes between the two groups but nothing very serious came out of it, that is, until the night of the murder.
Hector was out with friends in some of the dives around Bunker Hill. This was long before the hill became the glittering home of my corporate headquarters. At that time the Victorian neighborhood was a shell of its former self with seedy establishments haunted by lost souls left over from another era. The birth, death, and rebirth of communities are a never-ending story in Los Angeles.
The couple of pops with friends turned into an all-night bender as they crawled from jukebox to jukebox and cruised the tunnels under the hill in a borrowed convertible. At some point in the night, Hector crossed the line of no return and decided to power through with a few more drinks and then get himself sobered up before his morning shift started. Home was too far away in East L.A. and no one was of any mind to drive him out that way. They continued on until the group lost its steam, and Hector had his friends drop him off at the construction site where he found a pile of wrapping from roofing tiles and used that as a makeshift bed to sleep off the bender.
He was awoken by sounds of shattering glass. It was near sunrise and Hector had to orient himself, and his woozy head, to the commotion coming from no more than fifteen feet away. He saw Li smashing a set of newly-installed windows with a roofer’s hammer. Hector confronted him and the two faced off.
“I guess I could have took off,” he reflected and then summed up why he hadn’t. “We’re all just stupid, I guess.”
Hector pulled his knife, Li took a swipe at him with the hammer, and then it was over. All along I waited for Valenti’s entrance into the narrative. And now that we were at a point where a man lay dead, I was both confused and a bit dubious of the whole thing.