The Silent Second Read online

  “Are you Ed’s son?” I asked.

  He pretended like I wasn’t there.

  “I’m Chuck,” I said, extending my hand.

  The boy eventually shook it but he couldn’t be bothered to actually turn and face me to do it.

  “Rafi,” he said, staring out at the street.

  “I work with your father,” I said, purposely using the present tense. “I spoke to someone on the phone about dropping off some of your dad’s belongings.”

  “That’s nice of you,” he replied, but he didn’t actually mean it.

  “I hope…” I started, choosing my words carefully, “I hope everything’s okay with your dad.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  From the frustration in Rafi’s voice, it didn’t sound like the family had learned anything more about Ed’s disappearance.

  “Should I just leave these here?” I asked, gesturing to the box.

  “Give them to Papik,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes as if settling in for a late afternoon nap.

  Not knowing whom he was talking about or how to find this Papik, I settled in on the railing and waited. I soon found myself studying Rafi’s shirt, a dizzying design of vines, skulls, and celestial bodies that, if you stared hard enough and long enough, mutated into a fourth image while giving you a headache.

  Rafi opened one of his eyes, checking to see if I’d left.

  “Still here,” I said.

  He reluctantly pulled himself to his feet and beckoned me to follow him inside. It was a tight, two-bedroom bungalow with a standard layout. It felt more accommodation than home, underscored by the fact that the entire interior was covered in cheap tile, making for easy cleanup when preparing for the next set of nameless occupants.

  “My father probably got a deal on a bulk order,” Rafi said about the tile.

  The house also lacked any traces of femininity. There’d been no mention of a mother, and I began to wonder if she existed. Even without her, the simple math of rooms versus occupants highlighted a common fact about many immigrant households—rarely did anyone get a room to themselves.

  The image that Rafi gave off on the outside—with the luxury cars and designer clothes and twenty-dollar manicures—didn’t match the reality at home, that old-world tradition in which the family sticks together, one’s thoughts were everyone’s thoughts, and there was always a line for the bathroom.

  “He’s out there,” Rafi said, swinging open the back door and pointing to a swirl of smoke rising from the detached garage.

  I stepped down into the yard but turned back.

  “Rafi, if there’s anything we can do—”

  “You want to help?” he interjected.

  “If I can,” I said, wary of what was coming next.

  He just laughed and spared me whatever caustic remark he had stored up.

  I followed the smoke past a row of lemon trees to a gate that led out into the alley where an old man was hunched over a grill laid out with peppers on metal skewers long enough that they could be props in a sword-swallower act.

  “Smells great,” I said and introduced myself.

  He immediately took my icebreaker and ran with it by launching into a long discourse on the art of grilling peppers. You want to blister but not burn. A paper bag to steam the skin off. Leave the seeds inside if you want your face melted. Somewhere in the middle of the tutorial he noticed the box under my arm and the air went out of him. He continued to talk about the peppers but even to him they were just words.

  “My daughter wasn’t the prettiest,” the old man confessed, “but she was still a beautiful girl.” This kind of reflection saved for eulogies seemed to confirm my suspicion that Rafi’s mom wasn’t around anymore. “Good thing she got most of her mother’s looks and not all of mine,” he joked. “We came here forty years ago, but not Glendale. We lived in Hollywood with the other Armenians but we are all here now. What do you think of the house?”

  “It’s nice.”

  “It should be nicer,” he said with little self-pity. If anything, there was resentment in his voice. I scanned the garage, which served as an extra living room rather than a place to park your car. There was more character in this little space than the entire house and you got the sense that this was where he spent most of his day.

  “My daughter wanted to live up on the hill, not down here.” He gestured toward the looming San Gabriel foothills where a thousand California ranches twinkled in the late afternoon sun, staring down at him, smiling. “She was the dreamer. All the boys in the old neighborhood wanted to know her. But she only liked Bedros.”

  He said the name like it was a curse. It was quiet for a few moments, save for the dying hiss of the peppers on the grill. The old man fiddled with the peppers, readjusted the coals, did anything to not talk about Bedros. I recalled Ed’s personnel file where associates list out legal names and aliases. Bedros was Ed’s given name.

  The old man reminded me of another Armenian who lived across from me when I first came to Glendale. One day he bought a brand-new Cadillac that he couldn’t afford. For the older generation of immigrants, the American dream still included chrome and a hood ornament. This car had none of that but the emblem was there and of course the iconic name. The old man rushed over to my yard to be congratulated on his purchase. He had a father’s pride with that car. But it was short-lived, for as soon as he entered the house, his wife tore into him. His two grown sons soon descended on the scene. They eventually took the car back to the dealer and begged him for what little down payment was given. The old man was too ashamed to mention the Cadillac again. The way Ed’s father-in-law sulked over his peppers made me think he was ashamed, too. Not for a returned car, but for how his daughter’s life had turned out.

  “Then he leaves me like this, with this house, that boy.…” He let the words trail off.

  “What do you think happened to Ed?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. One of his business things.”

  “Was he doing something on the side?” I asked.

  “He’s Armenian,” he said with a laugh. “Everyone’s got something on the side.”

  “Have the police told you anything?”

  He waved my question off. “They don’t care about us,” he said. “They don’t even talk to us anymore.”

  For some reason, curiosity maybe, I asked him for the detective’s name and immediately regretted it. He scurried over to a workbench and produced a business card from an old box.

  “Will you try and help us?” he asked eagerly.

  “I don’t know what I can do,” I told him truthfully.

  “More than what the police are doing.”

  “You’re better off working with them. Or if they aren’t doing enough, hire a private detective—”

  “With what money?” he dismissed. “Bedros has all the money but we can’t use it.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Look at this house he made my daughter live in,” he said. “He never spent a penny on her. You should have seen the wedding. It was so cheap. Armenians like to throw a good party—the food, the wine, the cakes. I was embarrassed for my girl.”

  I couldn’t distinguish the truth from resentment toward a son-in-law he didn’t like. Ed earned a modest salary, but I also knew the powerful combination of a committed tightwad and compounding interest. Plus what he had going on the side, whatever that amounted to. Ed the missing person became more intriguing the more I learned about him.

  But a long career in HR was telling me to disengage. A whole FTE (full-time employment) can be lost in the minutiae of lives of people you hardly know. There were deep issues within this family, as there always are, and it was time to return this discussion to a more formal level. The policy of mailing a former associate’s personal effects was looking more appealing by the minute.

  “Please, sir,” he pleaded. “We need help.”

  I retreated into corporatespeak.

  “L
et me consider it,” I told him, which he enthusiastically accepted, pumping my hand graciously. The old man was so little versed in conference-room jargon that he failed to realize that phrase was as close to a definitive “no” as one would get.

  HOOK NOSE

  I looped around the side of the house under an unkempt hedge of bougainvillea and headed back to my car. I heard voices as I came up on the front porch where Rafi and a man were deep in conversation, speaking in hushed tones. Rafi was doing most of the talking while the other man leaned calmly on one of the railings. He was quite a bit older than Ed’s son and wasn’t from the original set I encountered when I first arrived at the house. He spurned the designer T-shirts and jeans for a plain pullover and black pants. He spoke very little but when he did it was forceful enough that Rafi clipped short whatever he was saying. They didn’t notice me until I emerged from the overgrown brush. I was able to get a clear look at the man’s profile, which was dominated by an unnaturally angular nose, possibly indicating it had been broken several times.

  “Take care, Rafi,” I said and crossed the lawn to my car. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a shared look between Rafi and the new man on the porch. There was an awkward silence before I got a reply.

  “Hold on a sec,” Rafi shouted and jogged over to me. I glanced back at the porch where the man was still sitting on the rail, his back to us, like he wanted to avoid being seen.

  “Did you get to talk to my grandfather?” he asked, though I wasn’t sure what he thought I was doing the last ten minutes in the garage if not talking with him.

  “Yes, we spoke.”

  “I should have given you a heads-up before you went out there. He can be a little hard to deal with.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “What did you guys talk about? I mean, did you talk about my dad?”

  He was probing, poorly.

  “Sure, we talked about your dad,” I answered, purposely keeping my reply short and devoid of detail.

  “That’s cool. Did he, did he ask you for help?”

  “Well, like I told you earlier, any help we can provide, just feel free to ask.” I knew that wasn’t what he was asking but wanted to string him along. He had that look of a child who thinks he is being clever by pulling one over on you, but the maneuvers are clunky and obvious.

  “What about helping to find my dad? Did he bring that up at all?”

  “Yes, he mentioned that.”

  “And are you? Are you going to help?” Rafi asked the question in a way that sounded like he wanted an affirmative reply, but his body language told me he didn’t want anything to do with me looking for his father.

  “No,” I told the truth. “There’s nothing I can do that the police aren’t already doing.”

  Relief immediately spread over him like a deep exhale. He looked much more at ease and proved it by becoming overly chatty.

  “That’s what I told him but he never listens. I love the guy, don’t get me wrong, but he can be pretty hard to deal with. He’s crazy like that,” he explained. “I bet he talked about my mom, right? Some stuff about coming to the States and living in Hollywood like it was a palace or something,” he laughed. “That guy’s living in a fantasy world.”

  “What happened to your mom, Rafi, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “She was a drunk,” he said coldly. There was pain in his voice, but he spoke with a half-smile. “She crashed her car and died when I was thirteen. She wasn’t even drunk at the time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Does that sound like the same person my grandfather talked about?” he challenged.

  We stood there in silence while Rafi worked to shove the thoughts about his mother back into the compartment they came from. “Anyway,” he said, “thanks for bringing my dad’s stuff out. I’ll let him know.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Have you spoken to your father?”

  “Sure,” he replied casually.

  “When?”

  “Last week.”

  “What happened? Where is he?”

  “He’s not here. He’s back in Armenia.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s fine,” Rafi assured. “He just had some stuff to take care of back home.”

  “Why didn’t he tell anyone? I mean, your grandfather is worried. We are all worried.”

  “I bet he’s worried,” he said with a laugh.

  “Listen, the next time you talk to your father tell him to call me. Better yet, tell him to call the police. This is very serious.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell him,” he agreed as he took my business card.

  “I mean that, Rafi.”

  “I understand.”

  I turned and walked to my car. I was fairly certain Rafi was lying about his father being in Armenia, but why he did it was a mystery. The Vadaresians were a strange and complex family, and I had merely scratched the surface of their lives.

  As I got into my car, I glanced over the roof at Rafi, who was back on the porch talking to the hook-nosed man. They seemed to have resumed their earlier conversation. The man still hadn’t turned in my direction.

  I took the freeway back against the grain of traffic. I approached the interchange below Dodger Stadium and eased into the left lane that slipped over the river in the direction of my apartment. A sudden pit formed in my stomach as I pictured myself in my apartment, alone, with nothing to do and several hours to go before the welcome distraction of a night’s worth of sleep. Those were the hours I feared the most, when I had nothing but my own thoughts. At the last second, I jerked right and took the route back to the office. Despite my initial rule of disengagement, there was more I wanted to learn about Ed.

  RED ZONE

  The skyscraper had a funereal quality once the cleaning crews had filtered out. Even the boldly ambitious had realized there was no point in staying late on a Friday if no one was there to witness their dedication. I padded down the empty hallway as the sensor-triggered lights flicked on to guide my way. The hum of the white-noise maker was unnervingly loud without the office chatter and keyboard clacking it was supposed to mask.

  While I waited for my computer to boot up, I pulled out the card Ed’s father had given me. The old man was skeptical that the police would find his son-in-law, and I tended to agree with him. From my short time living in Glendale, I had learned that the police force there was more of a revenue-generating unit than a crime-solving one.

  In that pursuit they employed myriad schemes to catch drivers in minor, but extremely costly, infractions. DUI checkpoints were primarily used to nab drivers with expired tags. One nefarious scheme involved an old lady whom they paid to use a crosswalk on an extremely busy street. If a driver entered said crosswalk before the woman had both feet back on the sidewalk, the officer would emerge from his hiding place and inform the driver of the bad news. They made the woman walk back and forth for hours, and the longer she was out there, the longer it took for her to get across, and the thinner the patience of the driver waiting for her. It was a very lucrative operation.

  I read the name on the card—Aricelli Alvarado. The fact that there was a Latino on the force wasn’t too surprising. Glendale PD was made up mostly of Caucasian males with overly crisp uniforms and buzz cuts, but it had its share of Latinos and Asians who commuted up from Alhambra. One group rarely represented was Armenians, a result seemingly by choice on the part of the police force and the potential applicants.

  I dialed the number and eventually got a recording of a woman’s voice. As the message wound down I panicked and hung up. I had no clue what I was going to say. Hi, I am a nobody who works in HR where a missing guy used to work, and I want to check up on how the investigation is going. She would probably think I was a crank. At worst, she’d get suspicious that I was somehow involved. I once read that serial killers like to know the details of the investigation into their murders. I realized, however, that she now had my number as a missed call with no mes
sage, and I was forced to call her back and leave a brief one. Already I was looking suspicious.

  I pulled up Ed’s digital file from our system. He came to the United States in 1980 and became a naturalized citizen in 1988. He had no formal education but was able to pass a high school equivalency exam. Background checks uncovered nothing of significance. He was involved in a legal dispute in the 1990s but the sides settled amicably. Ed had zero presence on the standard social networking sites and therefore could not be profiled for potential issues, such as a propensity to do tequila shots out of a stripper’s belly button. He was widowed and had one son. He named his father-in-law as his sole beneficiary.

  As an investment company that traded in securities, under law we were required to monitor associate transactions for conflicts of interest and insider trading. The majority of associates didn’t dabble in stocks or real estate and thus had nothing to report, but Ed’s entry was quite full. Maybe his father’s suspicion of a vast, secret fortune was accurate.

  Ed owned four properties in all. The first was the home I visited in Glendale, which he bought back in 1998, a good five years before the housing bubble took its first puff. Two other properties looked to be rental units in Glassell Park, and the fourth was in an industrial section not far from my apartment. Ed was a shining example of what drove Los Angeles.

  While the entertainment industry was the face of the city, property was the heart that gave it life. One had to look no further than the names of the various art and music venues around the city serving as the vanity plates of the extremely wealthy. From the Mark Taper Forum to the Ahmanson Theatre, the men who built Los Angeles’s cultural scene did it on the backs of the real estate and development business. Land was Los Angeles. What was unclear, however, was how the name Ed Vadaresian with his $68,000 salary was able to join the junior ranks of such an exclusive club.