Nickel City Crossfire

by Gary Earl Ross

  So why had he come for the woman who tried to kill Mona?

  I let that question settle into the back of my mind where parts of myself that I didn’t understand would work on finding an answer. Opening my email, I retrieved the documents LJ had promised and skimmed through them. Two of the reconstructed files were investment pitches. Flame Bright Fame invited investors to partner in the purchase of two properties adjacent to Buffalo’s growing medical corridor, for development as high-end residences for medical professionals. The language was a touch overdone, as was sometimes the case for educated people who thought fancy words equaled good writing. The third document was an internal memo that discussed successful techniques employed in other regions for getting reluctant owners to sell at low prices that made them feel they had outsmarted the buyers. Among these were aggressive intervention with assessors, which I took to mean bribes, and a suggestion that RoofRaiser, an experimental customer relationship management real estate database I had never heard of, could lower property values to favorable levels. All three documents carried the name QC Griffin, board chair—someone I would look for when I clicked the links from LJ.

  Apart from the obvious manipulation, nothing stood out to me then—except that poor people would be sacrificed in another round of feeding the rich while they were still at the trough. Then I thought of the woman I had met the other night at the bar association dinner, whose brother, Judge Chancellor, was the new man in Mayor Ophelia Green’s life. Glendora Chancellor-Pratt. Gentrification had been a central concern in her failed Common Council campaign. Perhaps she knew something about FBF. I made a note to contact her.

  My phone buzzed. A text from Jen: No meet til parents out of town. She’ll call u.

  Before I could key in a reply, the phone vibrated again with an incoming call. Ileana.

  “Gideon? It’s great news you found Keisha!” She sounded breathless, but not quite with excitement. “Have you talked to her yet?”

  “Still working on the details,” I said. “But she’s safe for now.” I paused. “Thanks again for all you’ve done.”

  “Can’t wait to see her.” Something in her voice caught. “But that’s not why I called.”

  “What is it, Ileana?”

  “Veronica. She called me at the office this morning.”

  “She did?”

  “She called out of the blue and said they had made her do something she didn’t want to and now they were after her so she had to get away.”

  “After her? Who are they? What did they make her do?”

  “She wouldn’t say, but she sounded scared. She asked me for money so she could get a bus ticket.”

  I fought the sigh that wanted to follow the breath I took in. “Intercity bus companies require photo ID these days. Does she have one?”

  “I don’t know.” Ileana was quiet for a moment. “Even if she does, after all she’s been through, she doesn’t look the same. Nobody will ever think she’s a doctor or even a driver. She presents as a substance abuser or someone with mental health issues.”

  “Or both,” I said.

  “The way she smells, they won’t even let her in the bus station much less on the bus.”

  I agreed with Ileana’s take on the invisible cloud that enveloped her friend but kept that thought to myself. “Could she want the money for drugs?”

  “Maybe.” She paused to consider, and when she spoke the hesitation left her voice. “She’s always on the make for drug money, but she never asked for a bus ticket before.”

  “She never asked you,” I said. “Could have asked somebody else.” I waited for a response. When none came, I added, “You’re going to give it to her, aren’t you?”

  “That’s just it. I was supposed to meet her twenty minutes ago at the Walgreens down the street and give her a hundred bucks for food and a ticket to her sister’s in Syracuse. She didn’t show.”

  31

  Dr. Glendora Chancellor-Pratt lived in a modern home on Carlton Street, a few blocks away from the school where she had taught for eighteen years and served as assistant principal and later principal for nine. Her study was a paneled room to the left of the front entrance. The shelves were full of books and trophies. The walls held framed citations that included her doctorate. In casual brown slacks and a matching headwrap, with a loose-fitting white top between, she sat behind an antique wooden desk. Closed laptop pushed aside, she held a mug of herbal tea in both hands. I sat opposite her, my notebook open, my mug on a coaster. I asked her to explain gentrification to me as if I were ten.

  “I hardly think such simplification is necessary, Mr. Rimes,” she said. “Gideon—if you’ll call me Glennie. After decades of teaching, I have a theory—unproven scientifically, of course—that the eyes are as much a window to the intellect as they are to the soul. What I see in your eyes tells me you already grasp the concept.”

  Her manner was calm but authoritative, her voice strong but pleasant. She was clearly someone who had talked for a living and was accustomed to adjusting tone and word choice to the responses she got. She reminded me of Bobby. I liked her.

  “Shakespeare would agree, Glennie, but he might make an exception in my case.”

  She laughed. “All right. Let’s start with this house. We had it built, Will Henry and I, twenty-five years ago, after our first home, which sat on this very lot for almost a century, burned down from faulty wiring—which was the fire investigator’s way of saying our fuse box was so damn old it melted.”

  “You decided to rebuild instead of relocating.”

  “We could have left, gone to the suburbs,” she said. “But we both believed it was important to maintain a stable middle class presence in this community.” She sipped her tea. “Fortunately, it was during one of those periodic waves of urban renewal. Our insurance was supplemented by federal funds so we could do more than just replace what we had lost. The end product was something that looked very suburban, right in the heart of the Fruit Belt. The year it was finished we began the tradition of having my last-day-of-school class picnic in the back yard. When I was principal, I made it an end-of-the-year staff cookout. Students and teachers alike who have moved on or moved away drop by when they’re in the neighborhood or in town, just to see how I’m doing. They remember this place fondly.”

  “It’s a lovely house,” I said.

  “And a loved house,” she said. “Will Henry was an engineer and helped design it. He was very proud of his work, especially this study and the solarium out back.”

  Because the lot next door was vacant, I had noticed the oval-shaped solarium when I walked from my car to the house. In the snow-covered yard, it resembled a transparent igloo. “I’m sure you’ll get a good price if you sell, but somehow I don’t think you will.”

  Glennie shook her head, sadly. “He had rheumatic fever as a child. His heart gave out nine years ago, in the bedroom right above us. But I still feel it beating in every room. I know it’s very Poe, but I hope you don’t find it too creepy.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I was raised by an English teacher.”

  She laughed again, harder this time. Then she said nothing for a few seconds. “I’ve had offers, even without a FOR SALE sign out front. That was one reason I ran for the Council seat. Will Henry and I were big proponents of economic integration. Like many black folks back in the red-lining days, we grew up in neighborhoods shared by white-collar and blue-collar workers and a handful of welfare recipients. Kids with fathers and mothers who worked factory jobs to provide a middle class life played and went to school and church with the children of black office workers, doctors, lawyers, people who owned corner stores, beauty parlors, and barbershops. Even the poorest kids saw examples of the fruits of hard work. Then came the civil rights movement and later race riots and so-called unrest. Lots of folks who could afford to move did. Housing equality was important but the poverty left in its wake grew more and more concentrated.”

  “Which made upward mobility harder.” I sip
ped my tea, a berry blend.

  “Exactly. Then factories began to close. Unions began to die. The entire middle class, not just black folk, started backsliding, even before jobs and businesses fled to the suburbs. For blacks, what could no longer be done by law was now done by wage suppression and limited public transportation. If you don’t have a car, how do you get to a job where the busses don’t run? How can you move up to the middle class if you can’t even get to the interview?”

  “You can’t,” I said.

  “The saving grace for the minimum wage worker, and the retiree with a piece of a pension, was always a poor neighborhood where they could pay the rent, even if they had to buy overpriced food from corner stores run by new immigrants who hand-painted their signs. That’s what this area became. But when you have economic development without economic integration, things change again. Once you build a high-tech medical corridor with jobs most neighborhood people just don’t qualify for and then convert empty factories and warehouses to expensive lofts and condos and upscale markets, poor folk and even the immigrant store owners get pushed out and have nowhere to go.” She set her mug down and leaned forward, looking straight at me. “The politicians, bankers, and developers tell us this is urban renewal, but it’s urban displacement fueled by greed. When there’s money to be made dead ahead, poor people are like a roadblock made of helium balloons. That’s why I ran, with the support of several neighborhood associations. But I lost to the incumbent. I didn’t know Ophelia then and had no idea she was the woman Hal had begun to see. Maybe her endorsement would have made a difference.”

  “You don’t see Mayor Green as part of the local political network?”

  “Not entirely. She broke through the Buffalo Boys’ Club to become mayor, even if she does work hand-in-glove with some of those threatening our neighborhoods. I could have provided a balance and helped keep her responsive to the people.” Recitation finished, she leaned back. “Does my explanation meet your simplicity requirements, or were you testing me?”

  “It tells me you’re the one to ask about efforts to gentrify. Are you familiar with any of the developers?”

  “The usual suspects. Benderson, Ellicott, McGuire, a few smaller companies, like Onyx Global Group. Merlotta dropped their proposal just a few weeks ago, right after the old man lost his run for mayor. Uniland submitted a new one the next day. So many projects and proposals are floating around nobody can say for sure what’s going to happen.”

  Now I leaned toward her. “Ever hear of FBF, Flame Bright Fame? I know, a strange tag for a developer. The board chair is one QC Griffin? Male? Female?”

  “A small outfit,” she said, thoughtfully rotating her mug as it sat on its coaster. “An upstart out of Detroit. Looking for investors and hoping to get a foothold somewhere as pay-to-play practices collapse under public pressure. Griffin is a man, I think, but I don’t know much about him. A college kid doing research for our neighborhood groups found another name, somebody who actually runs the company but keeps a low profile. Dante Cuthbert.”

  I wrote Dante Cuthbert in my notebook, right beside QC Griffin.

  We talked a bit more as we finished our tea. After she answered all my questions about gentrification, we drifted onto other topics, including my friendship with Ophelia and her late husband Danny. But when Glennie pointed to an award and recited its backstory, and then did the same with a citation, I figured it was time to leave. I pocketed my notebook, stood, and thanked her for the tea.

  She stood too, accepting my outstretched hand and holding it a few seconds too long.

  “Gideon,” Dr. Glendora Chancellor-Pratt said, “I know I’m somewhat older than you and I know from Ophelia you have a lady friend, a lawyer. Now, I don’t wish to embarrass you or in any way make you uncomfortable, but I like you. I get the feeling you like me too.”

  “You’re very likable, Glennie,” I said. “But I—”

  She leaned across the desk and silenced me with two fingertips pressed to my lips. “I just want you to know if things don’t work out with your friend, I’m available, for occasional comfort. I’m not interested in another marriage or keeping house with another man. But there are things I miss, things I don’t want to give up just yet.” She withdrew her fingers, put them to her lips for a moment, and smiled. “I can be very adventurous.”

  I returned the smile. “Even with Will Henry’s heart beating in every room?”

  Glennie shrugged. “It’s been a while, but I’ve been known to tell him to close his eyes or go wait in the solarium.”

  We both laughed but her face grew serious again almost instantly.

  “When you tell your lover about this—and if you’re the man I think you are, you will—please promise me that you’ll be kind. That you’ll both laugh with me and not at me.”

  “Promise,” I said.

  32

  On Thursday morning, Veronica Surowiec was found face down in the Black Rock Canal. Tangled in submerged tree roots along the east bank and bobbing amid chunks of ice, she was spotted at dawn by an employee of the nearby Buffalo Sewage Treatment Plant and recovered from the water by eight. But the body went unidentified until late afternoon. A fingerprint check led to an earlier drug arrest and, finally, to the Humanitas Institute.

  Ileana called me around four and told me, tearfully, that detectives were on their way to take her to view a body they thought was Veronica. She asked me to accompany her inside for the formal identification. I agreed to meet her outside the building.

  The Erie County medical examiner’s office was located at the rear of ECMC, the county medical center. I got there before Ileana, parked in the lot some distance away, and walked to the entrance. Five or six minutes later, a gray unmarked police car rolled into the parking lot and stopped near my Escape. To my surprise, Terry Chalmers climbed out of the driver’s seat. Wearing his brown fedora, Rafael Piñero got out on the passenger side and opened the door to the back. He offered a hand to Ileana, who got out and waved to me from across the lot.

  Chalmers walked toward me, bald head covered by a knit watch cap and dark face wearing a scowl. His hands were jammed in the pockets of his long leather coat. It was obvious they were balled into fists. Even at a normal pace, his long legs would have covered the distance more quickly than Ileana’s. But he strode faster today, bearing down on me with an urgency I had not seen in the couple months I’d known him.

  “Imagine my surprise,” he said when he reached me, voice deeper than usual, “when that nice lady told me if we got here early, she would have to wait for her friend Mr. Rimes before going inside. I only know one guy named Rimes, so this shit’s gotta be complicated.”

  “You and Rafael aren’t my only pals, Terry,” I said. “I may not be in George Bailey territory, but my friendship portfolio is pretty healthy.”

  “Fuck this guy Bailey and your portfolio! I want to know if this is related to the mess downtown the other night. You know, that missing overdose survivor whose mother caught a drive-by bullet and would’ve caught an air bubble in the heart or lungs if you hadn’t clocked a meth head with a water pitcher to keep her from sticking a needle into Mama’s vein.”

  “Good summary.”

  “Rafael’s report was good enough to get Shallowhorn to authorize protection for your client and for us to review two other investigations, which means serious attention to detail.”

  “I don’t know if it’s related,” I said as Piñero and Ileana joined us. I moved to Ileana, whose eyes were red-rimmed, and put an arm around her shoulders. “Ms. Tassiopulos works with Dr. Simpkins, the woman whose parents hired me. Ileana’s been helping me, giving me background details, introducing me to other colleagues and acquaintances.”

  Ileana confirmed what I said with a nod.

  “I understand you found Dr. Simpkins,” Chalmers said. “If somebody popped her mother to draw her out, she must know something we need to know. Where is she?”

  “Moving around and communicating by phone,” I said.<
br />
  “Got a number?” Piñero said, the tips of his ears reddening from the cold.

  “Different numbers.” I shrugged. “Borrowed phones, burners maybe. When her mom is released and her folks are safely out of town, she’ll come to me. Talk to me then, okay?” I looked at Ileana and squeezed her shoulder. “Right now, there’s another matter.”

  “They said she was found near the goddamn sewage treatment plant,” Ileana said, her voice cracking. “She deserved better than that.”

  Chalmers led us through the Family and Visitors Entrance into a corridor with mint green walls. I unzipped my jacket and pocketed my watch cap. As we passed the dry-erase on-duty board, I noticed that Mira was listed as working. She knew Chalmers and Piñero and had high opinions of them, but neither she nor I had ever disclosed to them we were foster siblings, raised in the same home and as close as any biological brother and sister. Their awareness of that would have compromised their professional relationship with her and our relationship with each other, especially when she bent the rules to help me on a case. On the way to the viewing window, a balding, white-coated staffer named Kevin led us past a closed office door that bore the nameplate MIRA POPURI, M.D. I did not expect to see my sister because she spent so much time in the autopsy room. But I listened anyway for the sounds of U2, whom she often listened to while doing paperwork. The office was quiet.