“No you won’t,” I told him and it seemed like he knew it.

“This is probably another one of the old man’s games,” he said. “We stomp you and then get arrested for assault. It might be worth it,” he said after some thought.

The last thing I needed was to get my ass handed to me in an Arcadia parking lot because someone thought they were getting back at Valenti.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” I said. “I don’t work for Valenti and this isn’t some kind of trick.”

“Then maybe we just stomp you anyway for fun,” he laughed and his buddies laughed with him. I tried to join in but they stopped laughing when I did. “What do you want?” Gao asked me.

“Can we talk? There are questions I can’t answer but you can.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I told him truthfully.

Perhaps my honesty struck a chord because Gao waved his friends off and together we crossed the boulevard to a coffee chain on the opposite side. The air conditioning inside was five degrees colder than the standard and the music three clicks louder than needed to have a conversation. We sat in the corner to escape both.

I asked Gao to fill me in on the Proposition and the impetus behind getting it put on the ballot. He effortlessly slipped back into campaign mode and all the flowery language that came with it. He spoke of heritage and cultural integrity. Away from the social club and the historical society, the banter fell particularly flat. “Social fabric” sounded especially tinny over iced lattes with an acoustic set playing in the background. Perhaps it was the setting or the recent events, but even Gao’s heart wasn’t in it. I let his diatribe peter out to its unconvincing conclusion.

“Tell me about the business angle,” I asked.

A different person than the one who sat down at the table began speaking. It was the voice of an ambitious young man who spoke with conviction. It was the first truly genuine interaction I had with him.

“It’s all about the condos,” he told me. “Chinatown is the next wave in the downtown revitalization. It’s hipper, closer to the freeways, sits over a new park, and you can walk to the train station. But there’s no housing. It’s just a bunch of two story dumps with live chicken stores on the ground floor. You can’t be renting a place out for three grand with rooster shit under you,” he laughed. “We’ve had our eyes on that end of Chinatown for a while now. Hell, you can walk to a Dodger game if you wanted to.”

“Who’s we?”

“My investors,” he clarified. “Then we get word that Valenti wants to put a museum there. I’m thinking, hell yeah! White folks love that art bullshit and it will give the place culture, which just means higher rent to me. We already had some pieces of property and were working on others but kept running into Valenti.”

“He had the same idea.”

“Trust me, there was plenty to go around. But he started making it difficult for us.”

Valenti didn’t want to share in the spoils that would result from fabricating yet another cultural center in Los Angeles. Each had pieces of what the other wanted but neither side wanted to budge. Valenti’s tactics for leverage were more advanced and had more weight behind them than Gao’s limited capabilities, “so the idea of the Proposition was born.”

Gao smiled like the kid who was the first to solve the math problem in the classroom. It was an infectious smile, and I couldn’t help sharing in the triumph at such a brilliant and calculating stroke to get the best of Valenti.

“It’s a shame we didn’t get to see it through,” he said as the smile faded. He shook his head, like an old man ruminating on his life’s one big regret. “That stupid lady.”

“Did you know what was going on in the house in Alhambra?”

“Do you know how many properties I have ownership in? Do you think it’s possible to know everything that goes on in them? I am a land owner, not a priest.”

“So you did know,” I told him.

Gao laughed the laugh of someone getting caught.

“You’re such a dick, man.”

“I know I am. But I am also right.”

“Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t.”

“Did you know Valenti’s granddaughter was staying there?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Not at first, anyway.” Gao explained that he got a call a few weeks back from a stranger who told him that he had a famous person’s family member at the home. “They were vague but kept hinting that there was money to be made in it.”

“Was it a man or a woman?”

“A woman,” he answered but didn’t have anything more to add. “I wasn’t thinking too clearly on the call.”

“What’d you tell the caller?”

“I strung her along to try to pump her for information but at the end of it just told her I wasn’t interested. And then as soon as I hung up I had the girl kicked out of the place. I panicked. The whole thing smelled bad, like I was being played. I was a mess thinking that any day it was going to come. You showed up last week and I thought that was it. But no cops were with you. So I waited and waited,” he said, “but nothing happened. A few days go by, then a week, then nothing. I was relieved as shit. Until the other day,” he added.

Gao had no warning that the raid was coming. Neither did he ever hear from the woman who called him asking for money.

“Do you know a nurse who worked there? Tala something?”

“You find that fat Filipina, you let me know,” he answered.

“Have you been looking for her?”

“Yeah, I am looking for her,” Gao grumbled. “The bitch set me up. Who do you think brought that problem into the house?”

I relayed the information Badger had discovered on Tala. She never showed up to work and her condo in the Valley was partly vacant, like someone who had left in a hurry. I had asked Badger how he came across this information, and he subtly told me she had left a window ajar and he had looked around a bit.

Gao couldn’t mask how impressed he was that I had this information. I seemed to earn some points with him on it.

“Do you think Tala could have been the woman who called me?” Gao asked.

“Maybe. But if all she wanted was money out of you, she didn’t need Jeanette to be at the house. She could have blackmailed you with the threat to expose the illegal activities going on inside the house.”

“Do you think she’s connected to Valenti?” I let my silence serve as a response. “Fuck, man,” he said like someone who has been played.

“One other link to Valenti,” I began matter-of-factly, “is a murder from 1963.”

Gao studied me.

“He killed my uncle,” he said flatly.

“Valenti was never charged with that murder.”

Gao understood the underlying meaning in my clarification.

“Allegedly, his thug killed him.”

“Why?”

“Because unlike my grandfather and unlike my dad, my uncle didn’t let himself be pushed around. He stood up to them. And they killed him.”

“What was it over?” I asked.

“It don’t matter. Another stupid deal that one guy got the better end of and the other guy didn’t like it.”

“This upsets you—”

“Fuck yeah, it pisses me off. My grandfather took orders. My big-shot father took orders. My uncle didn’t take orders and neither will I.” The statement was somehow equally defiant and yet full of resignation. Gao didn’t want to be pushed around by Valenti and all that he stood for but inside he knew that was exactly his fate. His anger wasn’t necessarily towards Valenti as it was towards the family that disappointed him. Also in his anger was a fear that his own limitations would lead to a similar outcome.

“Does it upset you enough to concoct a scheme to lure Valenti’s daughter in so you could finally get back at the man?” He studied me with abject hatred. “You never shut down that birthing clinic,” I reminded him. “And this mysterious caller doesn’t quite add up, especially since you never heard from her again. Now this Tala woman is missing and you apparently want her found but can’t seem to do it. Gao, it all sounds like a wild scheme to get back at Valenti that backfired and now you are covering your tracks.”