by Matthew Iden
“Do you know what she was working on when she got killed?”
He raised his hands. “Sorry, I don’t.”
“Weren’t you her boss?”
“Yeah, but our people aren’t like regular lawyers. They’re part attorney, part lobbyist, part gold miner. They can research their own deals and make them happen.”
“I thought you said you were the local quarterbacks for the big firms?”
“Yeah?”
“So how do you make your own deal? Don’t you need the big firms first?”
He smirked. “How do you think the white shoes hear about great investments in the first place? You think we sit around all day by the phone, hoping some Ivy League schmo decides to call from the clubhouse?”
“So you sniff around proactively, looking for a good setup,” I said, the lightbulb going on. “When you find something with promise, you call one of the white shoes and say, ‘You want a piece of this?’ ”
“Exactly. So when our attorneys aren’t closing a deal, they’re out looking for one. Which could be anywhere, coming from anyone. I only know about them when they reach the next stage, when it’s time to pick up the phone and call Boston or New York.”
I tapped the notebook on my thigh. I hadn’t written much down yet. “Your people don’t walk the streets, though, asking random strangers if they happen to know about the odd corporate development property. They have to work with someone.”
Montero poked his phone again. “Brokers. The attorneys develop relationships with local guys who keep their eyes out for a good deal coming down the pike. A tenement that’s about to get rezoned, a parking lot for sale, a row of brownstones some local slumlord wants to offload. They let us know and we start to put a deal together.”
“And the brokers get a finder’s fee?”
“Yep.”
“And you don’t know any of the brokers she worked with, I guess?”
“Sorry, my friend. Wendy liked to play it close.”
“She work with anyone here in the office who would know?”
A shake of the head. “Sorry.”
“ ‘Sorry’ as in she didn’t work with anyone, or ‘sorry’ as in I can’t talk to them?”
Montero just smiled, shook his head.
I tried from another angle. “Can I look at her computer? Day planner? Her desk?”
Montero gave me an I regret to inform you grimace. “Against our policy.”
“Even though it might lead to her killer?”
“There’s a lot of sensitive information about Tartikoff and Brentwood in her personal files—patented business strategies, methodologies, client financials, that kind of thing—that we can’t afford to get out into the wild.”
“We used to call that obstructing an investigation,” I said.
“If you can get a subpoena, we’ll be happy to let you look at whatever may be of help. Until then…” He trailed off, looking sad for me. Which I appreciated. Not a lot, since he was the source of my melancholy, but a little.
I tried a couple more sorties, but his shields were firmly in place and if he didn’t want to give me anything, he didn’t have to. I kept it cordial—who knew when I might have to come back and try again—and said my goodbyes.
“Good luck with that interview,” Montero called, smirking.
“Thanks,” I said and closed the door behind me. He’d already grabbed his phone.
His receptionist looked up as I came out of her boss’s office. I smiled and walked over to her desk. “You wouldn’t happen to know the name of Wendy Gerson’s assistant, would you?”
She smiled. “I’m sorry, I don’t. But I can check with Mr. Montero. If you’ll just have a seat—”
I sighed and waved a hand, stopping her. “Never mind. I couldn’t drink another cup of coffee.”
Chapter Eleven
While I’d made headway learning about what Wendy Gerson had done for a living, there was more blood to be had from this stone of Tartikoff and Brentwood, so to speak. I’d had enough caffeine for the week, but the best way to kill time surreptitiously in the modern age was at a coffee shop, the universal home away from home for newspaper readers, job seekers, and slackers. With one measly cup of joe, you could sit and write the next great American novel, read the Sunday New York Times cover to cover, or stare off into space, safe from social suspicion or scorn. The Starbucks catty-corner from the Streir building fit the bill, so half an hour before the lunch rush, I grabbed a twenty-ounce French roast, a Washington City Paper, and a window seat facing the street.
As a homicide cop, I’d kept odd hours, to put it mildly, and had eaten whenever, whatever, and wherever I could. But I’d seen enough of the DC office lunch hour to know how it worked. Until 11:55, you had your choice of restaurants and could be in and out in a few minutes if you were doing takeout. At noon, you were joining the rest of the city in making your way to the sidewalk. At 12:05, you’d better push back that one o’clock meeting to two, because you were in a line stretching out the door and around the block. Your daily productivity had just taken a hit that would take until late afternoon to get back.
For somebody doing an impromptu stakeout, though, it was wonderful. Not only could I be close to positive where my target would be within a ninety-minute window, I knew where they’d be and what they’d be doing. And once I figured out the exact where, I could close in and stand three feet away without fear of being made, just another dummy who’d gotten in the lunch line too late. Now I just needed the who.
I watched the bodies coming out of the Streir building, waiting to make my move. I passed on the stern-looking, gray-haired men in suits, the older women dressed in seven-hundred-dollar ensembles. These would be the real lawyers of the place, suspicious and tight-lipped. No mileage there.
But there wasn’t a law firm in the world that didn’t run on the efforts of its administrative assistants, paralegals, and mailroom grunts. And if Tartikoff and Brentwood leased ten floors in a twelve-story building, chances were good that anyone coming out for lunch worked for them. At 12:17, a gaggle of millennials came out of the Streir building, three girls in knee-length skirts and trendy blouses and a guy—gawky, with a pronounced Adam’s apple and a suit that fit fine, but somehow still seemed too large for him. They burst onto the sidewalk with an unconscious self-absorption, an insouciance that was simultaneously charming and profoundly irritating. Even as I packed up my coffee and newspaper to follow them, I could see them gabbling to each other, walking four abreast, unconsciously plowing through oncoming walkers. For them, the world consisted of office complaints and post-work happy hours, random hookups and weekend party plans. And not much else.
I snorted at my middle-aged disapproval. That was the reward of youth. You got good health, a vigorous sex drive, and a worldview that encompassed you and your environment out to about three feet. In return, you got shitty pay, dead-end work, and the scorn of your elders. It’s how it had always worked.
I slid off my stool and headed out of the coffee shop, following the four to a pastry and sandwich shop on the same block as the Streir. They probably had to be back in the office before their bosses, leaving just enough time to grab a bite, gossip, then run to their cubes before their lazy behavior could be noticed and noted in their annual review as an Improvement Opportunity.
I tossed my cup in a trash bin, then joined the line two back from my targets, well within eavesdropping distance. The conversation was less than scintillating. There were a lot of likes and yeahs and I know…right?s. Topics ranged over the ones I’d already guessed—who was sleeping with whom, who was likely to get fired for coming in with a hangover—plus a lot of stuff I couldn’t follow about music and technology. I think. Most of it left me in the dust. I couldn’t tell if they were talking about video games or bands. Or clothes.
This occupied the entire length of time we were in line together. Each one of them picked a “make your own sandwich” option, while I g
rabbed a premade salad out of a cooler, which let me catch up with them—as I was checking out, they were just getting their sandwiches. I poked around the condiment bar long enough to see where they were sitting, then muscled my way to a nearby single bar stool to keep listening. The effort earned me a dirty look from a guy in a gray suit who had been two seconds from planting his butt on the same perch.
I dug into my salad and kept my ears open, sitting through more of the same inane conversation as I’d been treated to in line. Not long after they sat down, though, talk inevitably circled back to work and the latest goings-on…including the office shake-up a visit by a certain nosy ex-cop had caused.
“Hey, what the hell was that meeting all about?” a blonde girl with bangs asked. “That’s, like, the second time ever I’ve been told to go to the main conference room. I thought they might talk about holiday bonuses, instead we’re getting reamed out by Tartikoff himself.”
“And they made us late for lunch,” the guy said.
“And why are they so worried about Gerson?” asked a curly-haired brunette picking at a fruit salad with a plastic fork.
“That’s Ms. Gerson to you,” the guy said pointedly, and the table laughed.
“I couldn’t make the meeting,” said the last in the group, a bottle blonde with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “That asshole Perry has had me doing data entry since I got in. What did they say?”
Blonde #1 popped another fry in her mouth. “Nobody’s supposed to talk about Gerson—Ms. Gerson—to anyone, no matter who asks. All questions are to go to Media Relations, no exceptions. Severe disciplinary action for anyone violating the directive.”
“Why now?” the brunette asked. “She died, what? Two weeks ago?”
The blonde shrugged. “Something must’ve happened. Or they meant to tell everybody right after it happened and finally got around to it. They’re not exactly lightning fast on things.”
“Like approving my vacation days,” the guy said.
“You worked with her, Caitlin,” the brunette said to Blonde #2.
“Yeah,” Caitlin replied. Her only lunch had been a tiny plastic cup of yogurt and she was busy scraping the bottom of the cup with her spoon. “She was a bitch, but I learned a lot.”
“Now what are you going to do?”
A shrug. “I don’t know. I was counting on her to give me a recommendation for school. Now I have to start over with someone else and do their grunt work for a year instead. Montero sent an email, though, and said he wanted to talk to me later today.”
“They find out who killed her?”
Blonde #2 shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. If I didn’t need that letter, though, I’d give them a medal.”
“God, what’s it like to get pushed in front of a Metro train?” the brunette wondered out loud.
“You know she took some sick days before it happened?” he continued, grinning like an imp. “She said she was feeling run down.”
“Billy!” all three said at the same time.
The hits kept on coming and the girls groaned at every one, but egged Billy on when he showed signs of slowing down. Apparently, Ms. Gerson was not a popular figure at the firm, at least not with the proles. I hung on for the whole thing—it was gratifying to hear my visit had shaken things up at the staid law firm—eating my salad slower and slower to maintain my façade. I needn’t have bothered. Occasionally, their eyes would slide over me as they spoke, but they were looking for other attractive or interesting people—specifically, those born since Bill Clinton was in office, not a lanky, grizzled fiftysomething oddly obsessed with eating his greens and flipping through a wrinkled copy of the City Paper.
Their conversation turned to other things like Macy’s sales and what kinds of cupcakes they’d get after lunch. I kept just one ear on their table while I read the newspaper. There wasn’t anything newsworthy to grab my attention and I was almost blindly turning pages when my eyes landed on a headline: Cancer Deaths of the Past Decade. My breath caught in my chest in a weird way. Almost against my will, I started reading the article, which—true to the title—was a memoriam of movie stars, musicians, and politicians who had died of my disease in the past ten years. The roll was astonishing when I saw the number of names on it, but worse was the almost physical reaction I had as I skimmed the article. In my mind’s eye, all I could see was the little white postcard on my refrigerator at home, waiting to be taken care of with a phone call to Dr. Demitri. An odd flush spread through my neck and chest. I angrily and noisily crumpled the page into a ball, nearly blowing my cover. My targets paused and looked over at me.
They went back to their conversation only after I made a big deal of ignoring them and chasing the last molecule of crouton around the edges of my plastic container. I quit after a minute, tossed my plastic fork and napkin into it, then stood and dumped the whole thing in the trash. I left the eatery, then headed back to Starbucks, where I bought another twenty-ounce ticket to sit by the window, depressed and irritable and trying to erase the newspaper article from memory. Ten minutes later, the four paralegals marched up the sidewalk exactly like they’d walked down it. While the guy and the bottle blonde turned into the Streir, the girl they’d called Caitlin and the brunette peeled away from the group and walked down a few more storefronts to a cupcake shop.
A few minutes later, each came out holding a massive pink snowball cupcake that looked as big as their heads even from across the street. They laughed as they tried to figure out the best way to tackle the things. The brunette decided to tease the icing off with a finger, one swipe at a time, while Caitlin dove into the side of her cupcake like a great white shark. They were still working on them as they walked back into the Streir and disappeared.
I opened my notebook to a blank page and jotted down a simple message. I need to talk to you about Wendy Gerson. Please call or email me as soon as possible. I folded the page twice and tucked an MPDC business card from the old days into it. Bumming an envelope from the kid at the register, I put the note and the card inside, and sealed it, then wrote Caitlin on the front, hoping I’d spelled it right.
The lunch hour was winding down, but that meant everyone wanted one last boost before heading back to the office, so the cupcake shop was filled to capacity. I waited patiently and, by the time it was my turn, I was the only one left in the shop.
A frazzled-looking black girl in a candy-stripe apron smiled at me. “Thanks for waiting. Can I get you something?”
I smiled back. “I wish you could. I’m diabetic, but my niece is a huge fan of this place. She works over at the Streir building? In fact, I bet she was just here. Cute blonde with a ponytail? She loves your—what do you call them?—snowballs.”
“Oh, yeah. We get a lot of the Streir people coming in here,” she said. “Something about practicing law must give people a real sweet tooth.”
“Her birthday is in a few days and I was hoping to leave a surprise for her. Do you think I could buy some cupcakes now and leave a note for her when she comes in tomorrow?”
“Sure. Why not?”
We spent a minute picking out a dozen cupcakes from the list—red velvet, peanut butter crunch, death by chocolate—all of them with enough sugar to rot every tooth in my head or slow my heartbeat down to a low ebb. I made sure she picked out two snowballs as part of the bunch.
“Wow, when did cupcakes get so expensive?” I asked when the girl totaled the order, thinking I could fill my gas tank for the same price.
“They’re artisan,” the girl said.
I glanced at the twelve cupcakes. “I guess they are.”
She wrapped a purple ribbon around the box, then grabbed a pen and paper and looked at me. “What’s your niece’s name?”
“Caitlin.”
“Last name?”
“Somterbjekyan,” I said, using the name of an criminology instructor I’d hated back at the Academy. Her hand, poised and ready, wavered and she bit her lip. I
gave her a second, then said, “Maybe just write Caitlin?”
She put the pen down. “Okay.”
“Would you mind giving her this when she gets the cupcakes?” I asked, handing her the envelope.
“No card?” she asked.
“Cards are so impersonal, don’t you think? I wrote her a little poem instead.”
“Oh, that’s sweet,” she said, and slipped the envelope under the ribbon.
I paid, tipped the girl excessively, and left. Getting Caitlin to talk to me with a stunt like this was a long shot, but she hadn’t seemed real pleased with her prospects at Tartikoff and Brentwood and the way she’d attacked her cupcake spoke of a headstrong and independent spirit. Or maybe she just liked snowball cupcakes. Either way, the high-calorie bribe and the false authority of my old MPDC card might spark some curiosity in her, get her to talk to me. If I wasn’t going to get anywhere through the formal channels, I might as well bribe my way with sugar.
Chapter Twelve
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Yep,” Chuck Rhee said, without taking his eyes away from the monitor. He was sitting at FirstStep’s reception desk, putting the finishing touches on a set of security cameras I’d installed for them. Amanda, Diane, and I peered over his shoulder, watching him make arcane adjustments to the settings on the screen. Rhee was a friend of mine from the Gangs division of the Arlington PD, though dressed in a black t-shirt, copper-and-twine bracelets, and wraparound shades, he looked more like a vapid club-goer on his way to a rave. Spiked hair and a couple of very obvious tattoos reinforced the impression. But he was a damn good cop and someone who would drop everything to answer a call for help.
I also knew he had a knack for computers and he certainly seemed to be doing something remarkable while we watched, though he could’ve been ordering lunch online for all I understood. While I was good on the physical security issues, like where to place the cameras, and I didn’t need help using a tape measure for the cabling, I was lost when it came to integrating the camera into FirstStep’s Internet service or, frankly, getting the most out of the $500 package we’d ordered.