“Badger,” I shouted back, “it’s Chuck Restic.”

“What do you got for me?”

There was little time for pleasantries with this guy.

“I got a unique one,” I told him and then lowered my voice. “But it’s not for the company. It’s for me.”

“Give me the name.”

The seriousness in his voice far exceeded whatever assignment I was about to give him. He brought everything to the level of an attempt on the President’s life. I loved this guy for it even if it was a put-on. I gave him the name of Valenti’s driver.

“Hector Hermosillo.”

Badger took down what details I had on the man. I left out, however, the incident with the knives. Badger taught me that part — you want to discover facts but you don’t want a filtered set of facts to skew the search for more.

I was anxious to see what he could dig up. Hector was an enigma in this affair of the girl’s disappearance. He had an uncommonly intimate relationship with Valenti and the family. He also was not someone you imagined a billionaire would use as his personal driver. The incident with the knife made me think he had other skills to offer.

Hector told me he was the one who delivered the money that Jeanette asked for, but she wasn’t the one who picked it up. The young man with the knife was the only person at the meeting point. It was there that Hector handed over the money but with a warning that if he saw him again he would kill him. I had to give Hector some credit for being true to his word. I believed he might have killed that boy if the gun hadn’t appeared.

“I’m putting this at the top of my list,” Badger announced.

“You don’t have to—”

“It’s at the top of the list,” he stated firmly, “because it needs to be.”

“Okay,” I smiled. His entire list was filled with number-one priorities. “I appreciate it.”

“You’ll be hearing from me soon,” and he hung up.

With Badger off on his assignment, I turned my attention to the paper I found in one of the self-help books in Jeanette’s room. It was a photocopy of an old newspaper article from 1961, most likely from its society pages. It was a few-paragraph story about the divorce of Carl Valenti of Carson and his wife Sheila Valenti, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Hawks, also of Carson. They had been married for eight years. It mentioned Valenti’s development company, the same one that some years later he would grow into the premier homebuilder in Orange County. It made no mention of children.

I spent the better part of my day playing detective on the internet trying to answer why Jeanette would be so interested in her grandfather’s first marriage. That meant skipping out on two touch bases and on a status meeting with my co-manager, Paul. I didn’t regret the latter. It spared me from having to endure hearing about yet another solution to the obesity epidemic.

It was fairly easy to track what happened to Valenti after the divorce. He remarried within a year to a younger woman, also from Orange County. They had one child, a little girl they named Meredith. The new Valentis became a fixture of the society scene in Southern California for three decades. Their names were attached to a full book of charitable organizations, saving everything from the South Bay to rescued greyhounds. The second Mrs. Carl Valenti died peacefully in her sleep in 2000 from complications of pneumonia.

Finding out what happened to his first wife, Sheila, proved a challenge. She and Valenti apparently met at Cal State Fullerton. She was Carl’s senior by several years. They married one year after they first met.

Sheila came from an established family in Orange County. There were several mentions of her father and his small manufacturing business in industry publications and business journals. He served on the town council for three terms in the city of Fullerton and was a senior officer in the local Lions Club. Her mother was a prominent figure in the Pioneer Society, a sort of D.A.R. for Californians. All these details portrayed a very comfortable, upper middle class life. But there the details fell off. The chroniclers of society life in Los Angeles eradicated Sheila post the divorce.

One thing I found, or was noticeably absent, was the mention of Fullerton on the long list of non-profits and charities Valenti was involved in. There were at least half a dozen educational foundations and universities that benefitted from his largesse. But not Fullerton. An interview with him on his business career made one mention of dropping out of school in his freshman year to pursue a start-up business venture. Sheila was his senior by several years. Perhaps she had completed her degree.

I checked several alumni news publications and eventually found a handful of Fullerton graduates named Sheila. More digging and photo comparisons led me to a Sheila Lansing of Pacoima. Some ten years after her divorce from Valenti, she married Fred Lansing, insurance salesman from Sun Valley. The public narrative for the Lansings was four decades of quiet existence — a fund drive for the local church, a fender bender at the intersection of Alto and Briar, second prize in a chili contest. Fred died in 1998. They had no children.

Sheila’s address hadn’t changed in forty years from the house on Fountain Street in Pacoima. I decided to make the drive out there to talk to her. I called Hector and told him to meet me out front of my building.

“I’m here,” he told me.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I moved to the window and pressed my forehead against the pane. Fifty floors down I could see a black sedan parked in the red zone and the driver standing by the passenger door. “Wave your hand.” The figure down below did as I asked. I wondered how long he had been out there. I didn’t like the idea of having a driver and really didn’t like the feeling that I was being watched. “Okay, I will come down.”

“He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious,” intoned a voice behind me. I slowly turned around to see a smiling Pat Faber sitting on the counter in my office.

“Hey, Pat,” I spoke casually. “What brings you here?”

I wasn’t sure how long he had been there and how much he had heard. The suspicious comment worried me some but not too much. That was just “Pat being Pat” as people liked to say.

Pat Faber made his reputation on folksy aphorisms. Apparently, he used to vacation in Montana and that credential alone granted him the credibility to spout country pearls like, “The owl of ignorance lays the egg of pride” and “You can’t buy the wrench until you know what size pipe you’re working with.” They had the resonance of something profound but couldn’t stand up to three seconds of reflection. However, that didn’t matter as far as his career was concerned. Pat quickly built an image of the “Wise Sage” and he rode it straight to a senior director role. That development would cause much anguish for scores of associates.

It was a firm rite that on every big project someone would recommend you “run it by Pat.” With that single request you were sentenced to hearing another of his homespun summations of your challenges that was either incorrect, incomprehensible, or both. But that’s not what you told him. Given Pat’s standing at the firm, the responses were much more supportive and included words like “game-changer,” “unique perspective,” and “out-of-the-box thinking.”

Eventually, Pat began to actually believe in the myth of Pat and he became a mockery of himself. It was, after all, a lofty image to uphold, and Pat felt the need to live up to it at all times. The aphorisms fell into overuse; they became hackneyed and tired. The projects associates had to run by Pat soon were of less and less significance. And eventually, Pat just became some weird guy spouting nonsense to the team determining what brand of coffee to serve in the break rooms. This was my direct report.