They kept coming, and I kept knocking them down. I took the best he had, and Pat knew it. By the end of it he looked more tired than I felt. He leaned back and offered up one more, a true softball if there ever was one.

“What will be your legacy?” he asked.

All I had to do was come up with a pithy reply about generational change and throw in some anecdote to seal it. Victory sat right in front of me. But I didn’t take it. I just sat there and said nothing. An uneasiness settled over the room. I detected a trace of glee as Pat watched me struggle.

The simple question had the effect of smelling-salts under my nose. I was suddenly overcome with the clarity that comes from complete detachment. We were talking, after all, about a legacy of a body of work that had no meaning. And then I remembered Bob Gershon, the gentle giant who learned that fact too late in his career to do anything about it. I saw his face as if he were there in the room with me. I watched him disappear behind the elevator doors.

One can only fake it for so long. I shook off my stupor and focused in on Pat.

“I probably won’t have one,” I answered, which was the first bit of honesty I muttered all day. “And if I were ever fortunate enough to have a legacy, I hope to God it wouldn’t be for this job.”

***

I noticed it first. I was on my way to lunch and spotted the black sedan parked in the loading zone in front of my building. These were common vehicles for executives getting rides to the airport but there was something about this one that caught my attention. In similar situations the drivers would do a quick pick-up or drop-off and linger for no more than the time it took to get the luggage out of the trunk. For those who had to wait for a dawdling CEO, the driver would usually fill the time polishing the windows. But this sedan sat idling, the tinted windows obscuring whoever was behind the glass.

I was foolish to let myself believe it was Hector inside there. His legal issues were far from over and there was no way he would be back into his old routine of driving Valenti around the city. I did secretly wish it was him. I wanted to see if he was okay. I also had many questions to ask him.

I circled around the sedan and went the long way to the sandwich shop across the street. Returning to the office, I saw the sedan still idling. As I started to cross the street, a voice called out.

“Can we talk?” Valenti asked. I went around to the other side and joined him in the front seat. He caught my bemused look at the image of him driving his own car. “I drove a truck when I was younger,” he shot back. “I’m not that completely out of touch with the real world.”

The air conditioner was pumping a steady stream of cold air that made the hair on my forearms stand up. As if sensing this, he lowered it to a gentle breeze.

“Anything I can do to help smooth things over at work?” he offered. “I could place a call.”

Even Valenti’s influence couldn’t undo all the damage I had done. I declined his offer. “I like to think I got myself into this situation and it’s on me to get myself out.”

“Still have that chip on your shoulder,” said Valenti.

“How’s Hector?” I asked.

“Hector will be fine.” Then appended, “legally, that is.”

“Has he been released?”

“Yes, he is out but has some charges lingering that we can hopefully get cleared up soon.” There was paternal pride in his voice. “We have the right folks working on it.”

I didn’t have a delicate way of broaching the subject of Jeanette and decided to just ask it outright.

“Have you heard from her?”

The man deflated. His only response came in the form of a barely-perceptible shrug. Faced with an outcome he didn’t want to accept, I got the sense he was here as part of a last-ditch effort to find some scrap of hope to keep him from avoiding the inevitable. I was tempted to oblige but couldn’t seem to muster up a lie.

“I’m sorry,” I said instead.

He turned away from me and placed his hand on the shifter. I took that as the signal that our brief encounter was finished.

“Who’s going to take care of this old man?” he asked absently.

All this talk about fortunes and inheritances and cycles of wealth suddenly felt insignificant. The old man was now an elderly man with elderly concerns.

As I stepped out of the car, he said behind me, “I’ll always remember the last time I saw her. Never let that happen to you.”

It was a personal admonishment framed as advice. But it was the worst form of advice — the kind given after it was too late to do anything about it.

I went back to the office and called Detective Ricohr. I was losing sense of why I made the decisions I did other than this one just felt like the right thing to do. I needed to know some things about Jeanette.

He called me back later in the afternoon. He was more cheerful than I anticipated. I had caused this man nothing short of grief with my amateurish meddling. I would have swatted me away a long time before, but Detective Ricohr had a far deeper reserve of patience than I ever did.

“There was no evidence of the girl or baby in the building where it happened,” he told me after the preamble about how he shouldn’t be telling me this information, that it is still an ongoing investigation, etc. He was probably doing it for the recording machines at police headquarters. “And no evidence of her being at the victim’s condo,” he preempted my question.

“What’s the collective view on the kidnapping?”

“There’s some disagreement. Most think she and the Portillo boy were in on it all along, that it was some sort of blackmailing scheme. What they had on the old man no one is really sure. A minority think they were just two dumb kids duped into participating. In both scenarios we think she and the baby are dead. That’s the one area where everyone agrees.”

I thought that through but something didn’t fit.

“You don’t like it,” he stated.

“I am not sure I know enough to like or not like it,” I told him. “But it doesn’t seem right.”

“Not everything ties up into a nice little bow, you know.”

“You’re right,” I agreed, as unappealing as those words were.

“Are you done?” he asked.

“I can’t think of any other questions.”

“No, are you done with the whole thing?” I didn’t know how to answer him. It felt like there was more to do. My internal deliberation gave him his answer. “I didn’t think you would be. This will fall on deaf ears, but don’t be an idiot.”

“I’ll try not to,” I laughed.

“Seriously, don’t be an idiot.”

“That’s sound advice, Detective.”

“Make sure you take it.”

A FAMILIAR SOUND

This time I came prepared.

I parked my car in an open spot fifty yards or so from the house. I brought food and water to last for some indeterminate length of time, enough backlogged newspapers to occupy my mind, and a blanket and pillow, but I didn’t end up using the latter. For a day and a half I stewed in my car in the merciless heat and picked at the flaw in the consensus thinking around the blackmailing scheme. If Jeanette and Nelson were complicit, wittingly or unwittingly, why would she be the only one who had to lose her life?

In the time outside his house, I never saw Nelson but that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of activity. It mostly revolved around Nelson’s brother, often accompanied by his grandmother but sometimes alone, coming and going from the house on an endless stream of errands, most of the time returning with arms laden with giant shopping bags of unknown contents.

Things settled down in the evening. The lights burned behind the curtains for so long that I thought no one ever turned them off. They eventually went dark sometime after midnight and stayed dark until a brief moment in the early hours when a light from somewhere deep in the house clicked on. The faint yellow spoke of insomnia or thirst or something else. It didn’t last long and the house remained dark for the rest of the night.