“I don’t understand. How did Valenti save your life?”
“He showed up to the job site an hour later and found me. I was crying — crying like a little baby. This guy was dead and my life was over. He asked me what happened, and I told him.”
“Then what?”
“He left, told me to stay where I was and not do anything. He came back twenty minutes later with the boy’s father.”
I made him repeat that last part. I had heard it clearly enough but it didn’t sink in. He confirmed that Valenti brought the elder Li to the construction site and showed him the poor boy’s body and explained what happened. Hector apologized to the man, but the old developer didn’t say anything to him. He and Valenti eventually walked away to talk in private. Valenti returned alone and gave Hector instructions.
“We were supposed to call the police and say that Li had threatened Valenti with a hammer and that I came in to protect him and that’s how the boy died.”
“Why didn’t you just tell the police the truth? It wasn’t murder the way it happened.” His look was enough of a reply to make me sorry I asked. In those days there wasn’t a lot of faith in the police or the courts to listen to reason, especially when minorities were involved. He was right in assuming his chances were slim to none.
“Either way I was supposed to die that day. Either get killed or get sent to jail,” which in his world was just a different kind of dying. “And he saved my life. I owe him.”
THE CORNFIELDS
I was five minutes late for the rendezvous with Hector because Pat Faber had dropped by my office to see if I was getting nervous about the upcoming interview. That wasn’t how he phrased it, but I could tell that was his intention. I told him that I looked forward to the competition and that I was going to “rise to the challenge,” but the hope for a quick chat was not in the cards. Pat reflected on the many defining points in his career where he similarly rose to the challenge — and won. After several minutes of my telling him how invaluable his perspective was, I finally extricated myself from the tedious discussion so that I could go meet Hector.
His sedan was parked in one of the three slots out front of the Phoenix Bakery in Chinatown. I had to park on the street. The sweetened air around the bakery was so pervasive that each breath felt like another layer of sticky film was added to my throat. It made me thirsty, but it could have just been that I was nervous.
Hector got out when he saw me and he was not pleased with my tardiness. I knew enough to skip an apology and just get down to business.
“Badger here?” I asked.
“Right here,” came the reply as Badger stepped out of the shadowy area by the restaurant next door. He wore his amber sunglasses despite the moonless night and this desolate part of the city being one of the darkest in the area. I could barely see anything beyond an arm’s reach, but he maneuvered easily and proffered a conciliatory hand to Hector.
Earlier that day, Valenti was instructed to deliver the money to a spot in the middle of the Cornfields, a long park that used to be a railway yard just south of Chinatown. Hector was the natural choice to perform the deed, but Valenti did not count on my being involved, and Hector did not expect Badger to be there as well. He stared at Badger’s outstretched hand with visible contempt.
“No hard feelings, paco,” said Badger, doing his best to provoke an already-annoyed man.
Hector looked to me for an explanation.
“Another set of eyes can’t hurt,” I told him. He didn’t like it but he didn’t have much of a choice as we were an hour away from the appointed time. “Do you have the money?” I asked Hector because that felt like the right thing to do, though the idea that he would forget the money on the night of the drop was absurd.
Despite all that, Hector moved around to the back of the sedan and opened the trunk for us. Three million in cash was surprisingly smaller than I anticipated. I envisioned a forklift and a heavy pallet but instead got a medium-sized duffel bag. But it was heavy — very heavy.
For a moment while holding that bag, I felt the warmth and comforts of being a millionaire. And I had an impulse to bolt. I heard Badger grunt behind me. Even Hector cast a sly, little smile. This was the moment when someone would casually suggest the money getting lost and the three of us running off to Mexico. Hector squelched that dream by snatching the bag from my hand and replacing it in the bed of the trunk.
We went over the plan while standing there in the bakery parking lot. Hector would deliver the money as expected. He was going to enter the south side of the park, off of Spring Street. Badger with his WWII battleship binoculars would position himself on the Gold Line platform towards the west end of the park that offered an elevated and unobstructed view of the entire area. I would wait in my car on the north side of the park on Broadway. This also offered an elevated view of the area as the land gradually sloped upwards towards Elysian Park, the 110 freeway, and Dodger Stadium. But it also was an exposed area with very little cover and almost no human activity at night. I needed to be careful lest I was spotted before the drop could be made.
The idea was that once Hector delivered the money to the requested spot, Badger and I would watch the area for the individual who picked it up. Part of me wished it would be Jeanette, despite the complications that would involve. But deep down I knew it was an unlikely scenario. The more logical outcome would be that whoever picked up the money was behind her disappearance, and possible death. We weren’t going to let that person out of our sight.
“I’m on point,” Badger explained. “I can reconnoiter from the shield wall on the platform.” Badger was using an inordinate amount of military lingo for my taste and I could see it was grating on Hector as well.
“If you screw this up,” Hector warned, “I will kill you.”
“Listen, chief, I know what I’m doing.”
“He does this for a living,” I added but had little effect on changing Hector’s overall mood.
“You brought him,” Hector reminded me. It was clear that in Hector’s mind, the threat towards Badger also included me. We all wanted to do this right, but Hector was the only one with something to really lose.
We tested our cell phones for good coverage and established a three-way text as a communication channel. As Badger’s “ROGER THAT” text buzzed in, Hector stomped off to his sedan and drove away.
Badger set off to the train station on foot, while I got in my car and drove the short distance down the road to a spot just on the edge of complete desolation where the industrial buildings ended and the run down to the L.A. River began. There was a bus stop inexplicably placed on this stretch of road like a last stop to nowhere. Even more perplexing than its existence was the fact that four or five people were waiting in the glass structure. It looked like a perfect cover for me to watch the proceedings in the park below.
I shuffled over to the bus shelter and mingled among the riders. There were two old Asian ladies with canvas sacks full of leafy vegetables and what appeared to be a plastic bag of chicken feet. The other three were Latino laborers either coming from or on their way to a nondescript manufacturing center on the other side of the river. They had the tired eyes of someone on the eternal night shift.
The tie and jacket were left behind in the backseat of my car but I was still odd man out in my pressed pants and recently-shined loafers. And while the coterie of late evening riders watched with longing eyes for any signs of the bus emerging from the flickering neon of old Chinatown, I was fixated on the black pool of park below me, a flat mass broken only by evenly-spaced lampposts and their white circles of light.