“Do you know who the father of Jeanette’s baby is?” Hector shook his head. “Your boss was very close to his granddaughter, wasn’t he?” It came out crasser than I intended, not that any degree of tact would have mattered because once the allegation registered with Hector, he leapt to his feet and his right hand flicked for his pocket. “Take it easy,” I said. He stared at me with distant eyes. For the first time in our relationship, I was actually afraid of the man. “Hector, listen to me. You didn’t come here because you thought I was out to get the old man. You want to help him and you think I can help you do it. And I’m trying. I want to bring Jeanette home as much as you do and almost as much as Valenti.”

Hector hadn’t moved and it was unclear if any of the things I said had any effect on moving his hand away from the nifty little number in his pocket. I wanted to get him talking.

“If I’m going to help you, I am going to need some answers. You and Valenti have a pretty tight bond — I can see that by the way you defend him. I need to know why.”

The forever-young man with young-man-like reflexes and a younger man’s temperament seemed to dissolve in an instant. I could now see the greys beneath the shoe-polish black. I felt the aches in his lower back. I saw the tired eyes of someone who had seen too much over too many decades.

“I should have died,” he said, but the death he was referring to was not the one I assumed it was.

Hector recounted the events leading up to the night in 1963 when Gao’s uncle lay dead on the street in the Alpine District. To my surprise he came right out and admitted to killing the man. “I stabbed him in the stomach and he didn’t fight any more,” he stated. Hector looked straight at me when he said it. I searched for signs of remorse and found none. But it wasn’t like he was proud of the deed, either. There was a strange detachment from the retelling of the death, a matter-of-factness that escaped my own sensibilities.

The actual events were mundane to the point of being a cliché. Hector was working for the construction company that Valenti owned. It was his first real attempt at a stable earning life. The job was a small development where a corner of a block was being converted into row houses. Hector explained that there were troubles immediately with the job. Their work was periodically vandalized, their supplies constantly delayed, their tools stolen. “That was the worst part,” Hector explained, “because we had to bring our own tools and without your tools you couldn’t work. It cost a lot of money to replace them. It was money out of our pockets.”

Everyone was certain that the younger Li was behind it. It wasn’t much of a secret, as his cronies taunted the workers whenever they could. They often hung around the job site, and sometimes Li himself joined them. There were a few skirmishes between the two groups but nothing very serious came out of it, that is, until the night of the murder.

Hector was out with friends in some of the dives around Bunker Hill. This was long before the hill became the glittering home of my corporate headquarters. At that time the Victorian neighborhood was a shell of its former self with seedy establishments haunted by lost souls left over from another era. The birth, death, and rebirth of communities are a never-ending story in Los Angeles.

The couple of pops with friends turned into an all-night bender as they crawled from jukebox to jukebox and cruised the tunnels under the hill in a borrowed convertible. At some point in the night, Hector crossed the line of no return and decided to power through with a few more drinks and then get himself sobered up before his morning shift started. Home was too far away in East L.A. and no one was of any mind to drive him out that way. They continued on until the group lost its steam, and Hector had his friends drop him off at the construction site where he found a pile of wrapping from roofing tiles and used that as a makeshift bed to sleep off the bender.

He was awoken by sounds of shattering glass. It was near sunrise and Hector had to orient himself, and his woozy head, to the commotion coming from no more than fifteen feet away. He saw Li smashing a set of newly-installed windows with a roofer’s hammer. Hector confronted him and the two faced off.

“I guess I could have took off,” he reflected and then summed up why he hadn’t. “We’re all just stupid, I guess.”

Hector pulled his knife, Li took a swipe at him with the hammer, and then it was over. All along I waited for Valenti’s entrance into the narrative. And now that we were at a point where a man lay dead, I was both confused and a bit dubious of the whole thing.

“I don’t understand. How did Valenti save your life?”

“He showed up to the job site an hour later and found me. I was crying — crying like a little baby. This guy was dead and my life was over. He asked me what happened, and I told him.”

“Then what?”

“He left, told me to stay where I was and not do anything. He came back twenty minutes later with the boy’s father.”

I made him repeat that last part. I had heard it clearly enough but it didn’t sink in. He confirmed that Valenti brought the elder Li to the construction site and showed him the poor boy’s body and explained what happened. Hector apologized to the man, but the old developer didn’t say anything to him. He and Valenti eventually walked away to talk in private. Valenti returned alone and gave Hector instructions.

“We were supposed to call the police and say that Li had threatened Valenti with a hammer and that I came in to protect him and that’s how the boy died.”

“Why didn’t you just tell the police the truth? It wasn’t murder the way it happened.” His look was enough of a reply to make me sorry I asked. In those days there wasn’t a lot of faith in the police or the courts to listen to reason, especially when minorities were involved. He was right in assuming his chances were slim to none.

“Either way I was supposed to die that day. Either get killed or get sent to jail,” which in his world was just a different kind of dying. “And he saved my life. I owe him.”

THE CORNFIELDS

I was five minutes late for the rendezvous with Hector because Pat Faber had dropped by my office to see if I was getting nervous about the upcoming interview. That wasn’t how he phrased it, but I could tell that was his intention. I told him that I looked forward to the competition and that I was going to “rise to the challenge,” but the hope for a quick chat was not in the cards. Pat reflected on the many defining points in his career where he similarly rose to the challenge — and won. After several minutes of my telling him how invaluable his perspective was, I finally extricated myself from the tedious discussion so that I could go meet Hector.

His sedan was parked in one of the three slots out front of the Phoenix Bakery in Chinatown. I had to park on the street. The sweetened air around the bakery was so pervasive that each breath felt like another layer of sticky film was added to my throat. It made me thirsty, but it could have just been that I was nervous.

Hector got out when he saw me and he was not pleased with my tardiness. I knew enough to skip an apology and just get down to business.

“Badger here?” I asked.

“Right here,” came the reply as Badger stepped out of the shadowy area by the restaurant next door. He wore his amber sunglasses despite the moonless night and this desolate part of the city being one of the darkest in the area. I could barely see anything beyond an arm’s reach, but he maneuvered easily and proffered a conciliatory hand to Hector.