“I caught him coming out the back window,” Hector told me. “He could barely fit,” he added.

The old woman rushed over to console her boy. She had a few choice words for Hector who quietly took them like he was the child who had spent a lifetime disappointing her. He let her have her say, which was plenty. Apparently the fact that she lied to me and was just stalling to give her boy time to escape didn’t factor into the list of things to admonish. I followed Hector’s lead and let her get it all out of her system.

“Nelson, we’re trying to help you,” I said during a break in the abuelita’s recriminations. “Can’t you see that?”

“Whatever,” he pouted, the word every teenager resorted to when they had nothing to say.

Hector made a move towards him, but I held out my arm to intercept.

“Can we talk together in the back?” I asked the boy. I needed to get him away from the security blanket to his left and the menacing figure in front of him. I gestured for him to follow me. He reluctantly took my lead and got up from the couch. Once more I had to tell Hector to stay behind. He shot me a look and then glanced at the old woman whose eyes bored in on him.

“I’ll go outside,” he decided. “Lock the windows,” he advised as he went out the front door.

Nelson’s room was smaller than a junior walk-in closet. Twin beds placed in one of the corners created a perfect L-shaped “couch”. I sat first. The bed creaked and sagged so much that I feared I wouldn’t be able to stand up without a struggle. Nelson wasn’t fully committed and remained in the doorway.

The walls were plastered with a collage of music posters, fashion magazine pages, and his own photographs. The black and white photos were of an artistic bent with their Dutch angles and extreme close-ups. There were an inordinate number of reflection shots — through mirrors, glass doors, and off ponds and puddles. I marveled at youth’s unceasing ability to seek depth in shallow pools.

I pointed to one of the few photos with human subjects. It was a close up of Nelson and Jeanette, cheeks pressed together, smiling up at the camera held an arm’s length away.

“You two look happy,” I said.

Nelson didn’t bother to look up. He stared at some random spot on the carpet like he was trying to burn a hole through its already thin threads. A duffel bag packed nearly full of clothes sat on the floor close to the spot where Nelson put all of his intense attention.

“Where were you going with all of that?” I asked. Failing to get him to engage I tried a different tack. “Did you learn how to drive a stick shift yet?” I teased. This kid had some anger in him and if there was any chance of getting him to talk, I was going to have to engage that anger.

“Don’t take this the wrong way but you’re an idiot. Guys like you and me, but definitely guys like you,” I clarified after giving him the once-over, “don’t take on guys like Valenti.”

I was intentionally casual about my delivery to try to convey an inevitableness to what I was about to tell him. “Do you know how much money he has? Whatever money you think he has, multiply it by a thousand, and then you’ll be half-way there.”

“You think I care?”

“You should. That kind of money buys you things, and I don’t mean stuff like a home better than this.” I made a dismissive gesture to the shabby surroundings.

“That’s how we’re different,” he said, mustering up some self-righteousness, “because that kind of thing don’t matter to me.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I corrected. “And you’d like to think it doesn’t, but it does. With his kind of dough people can be bought for a price. Me — why else would I be wasting my time here with you? That old pachuco out front, you—”

He scoffed. I gave it a brief pause.

“Jeanette.”

“You don’t know her,” he shot back.

“I don’t have to.”

“She doesn’t even care about money.”

“Rich people always say that.”

“She’s different,” he countered. “You wouldn’t even know it when talking to her that she’s super rich. She’s just a regular girl,” then realizing how inadequate that sounded, he appended, “but also different. Special.”

All along I never thought that Nelson’s involvement with Jeanette’s disappearance had any trace of a malicious nature. His strident defense of his girl made me wonder if all of this was simply over star-crossed young love by two kids from disparate neighborhoods. A for-profit school with a mission for diversity brought them together. A baby eventually came out of it. It seemed so antiquated for contemporary Los Angeles and for what seemed like a fairly progressive family but some prejudices run silent and they run very deep.

“Do they not like you?” I asked, keeping the subject of the potential hatred broad. I wanted him to fill it in.

“Who?”

“Her family.”

“They don’t care enough about her to worry about me,” he said.

I felt a dull pang in my chest and subconsciously rubbed my shirt back and forth as if warming it up would make it go away. It was one of those feelings that sometimes reared up on the commuter bus ride home at dusk or in the audience of one of those unnecessary conferences I always had to attend. It was that disquieting feeling of being alone.

I thought of Jeanette, the shelves of self-help books, her distracted parents, her lying in that clinic surrounded by strangers, and I felt for the first time a real need to find her. I didn’t necessarily need to bring her home, just find her and talk to her. I’d figure out what I would say later.

“All right, I’m in,” I told him.

He looked at me quizzically.

“In on what?” he asked.

“Whatever it is you guys are trying to do. I’ll help by getting the old man off your backs.”

I could see Nelson internally deliberate the offer. He was trying to determine if this was a trick. Over-selling the offer would only increase his suspicion that it was a trap, so I decided to pull back a bit in order to enhance its legitimacy.

“I don’t even want to hear the plan. I assume it’s a horrible one,” I said with disgust. “But I’ll do what I can. Probably won’t be successful but I will try.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Help us.”

“You look like you could use it.”

After some shuffling of feet and more pouting, I got him to agree on a place and time to meet later that night. I tried to get him to bring us to Jeanette but he wouldn’t go for it.

“I have to talk to her first,” he explained. “You guys show up with me…she wouldn’t forgive me if I did that.”

I didn’t have much choice but to trust him.

“Okay,” I agreed and proffered my hand and shook the dead fish he offered back. “Come on, kid, first thing you have to do is tighten up that shake.”

I left a smiling Nelson to finish packing and walked back to the car where Hector waited by the driver’s door. He looked past me as if expecting to see Nelson in tow.

“We’re going to meet him tonight at a Rally’s out in the Valley,” I explained. Off his quizzical look, “He’s going to bring Jeanette with him.”

Hector said nothing but he didn’t have to. I could hear the doubt in his silence.

“He’ll bring her,” I said.

***

He didn’t bring her. He didn’t even bring himself.

We wasted four hours driving out to Sunland and sitting in a Rally’s parking lot waiting for Nelson and Jeanette to show. But they never did. Just as we were about to call it a night, Hector’s phone buzzed.

“Is it her?” I asked.

“No,” he said and studied the number. “It’s Valenti.”

We both sensed what was about to happen next. I observed Hector answer and casually look away to some random spot across the parking lot as he listened to the old man. It was a short conversation.

“He wants to meet us at the club,” he said.

Hector said nothing on the drive. Perhaps it was my imagination, but he started to resemble the Hector I knew when we first started out on this work. He was morphing back into his old role before my eyes. Or, I was projecting my feelings onto him because I knew at the end of this drive I was going to be fired.