by Matthew Iden
“Hi,” I said. “I saw you pass by and thought I’d drop in.”
She put down the pen. “Hi.”
“How are you?” I asked from the doorway. It seemed a respectful distance.
“I’m fine,” she said. “How are you?”
“I’m good.”
“That’s nice.” We looked at each other. Seconds ticked by. Julie seemed confident and in control. “I heard you might’ve been able to convince that guy who broke in here to stop.”
“It didn’t take much,” I said, downplaying it. “He’s a bully and bullies are wimps.”
“You sound like you know him personally.”
“I’ve seen his type,” I said. “A little bit of persuasion from the right corner goes a long way.”
She frowned. “You didn’t assault him, did you?”
“Why does everyone think I go around breaking fingers?” I asked. “No, I didn’t assault him.”
“You threatened him?”
I shook my head. “Nothing so crass. He owes his paycheck, car, and house to his politician father.”
“So, you threatened his father.”
“Obliquely, yes.”
She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “FirstStep doesn’t need a lawsuit on its hands. It’s barely keeping its head above water as it is.”
“Believe me, I know,” I said, with an edge to my voice. “Better than you do.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“Who do you think is paying for Amanda’s broken arm?” I asked, then regretted it. You don’t talk about that kind of thing. It was self-serving and sounded like it.
“I see,” she said. “How noble.”
“It’s not noble, it’s what had to be done,” I said, angry and confused. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I’d walked down the hall. “Look, let’s talk about something else.”
“All right,” she said. “How’s your cancer?”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
For the first time, the mask of confidence slipped from her face. “Amanda said you were in remission. That you were doing better.”
“I am. I just…can’t we talk about football or something?”
“Isn’t that a positive thing? I mean, if you’ve beaten it…”
Julie once told me that her mother had died from cancer, so a part of me understood her impulse to ask, but—hey—I was the one we were talking about. “I don’t know that I’ve beaten it. All I know is that it hasn’t come back for a year.”
“Aren’t you going to your checkups?”
“Yes, I have one coming up,” I said. “But they might say it’s back, or it’s not, or they don’t know and just keep an eye on your stool, Marty, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“What, no news is good news?”
“Something like that,” I said. I felt like I was on a downhill slide and couldn’t stop myself if I’d wanted to. “Most of my news to this point has been lousy.”
“You’re alive,” she said simply. “There are a lot of people who aren’t lucky enough to say that.”
For a second, I couldn’t believe I’d heard her correctly. Blood rushed up through my face and an ugly feeling took over. “Lucky?” I pointed at my chest. “I’m lucky?”
“Yes. Not everybody is—”
“Lucky is finding a five-dollar bill in your dresser drawer. Lucky is winning tickets to a baseball game. Lucky is not getting cancer.”
Julie swallowed and put her hands up. “I didn’t mean—”
“If I’m lucky, I’ll live to see sixty. I won’t have surgery again or have to shit in a bag for the rest of my life.” I was shouting now. I couldn’t help it. Something had been ready to pop and Julie had been the one with the opener. “If I’m lucky, the best I can hope for is that my life gets back to normal, where it should’ve been all along.”
Julie stood, came around the desk, and brushed past me on her way out of the room. I said the last sentence to her back. Her face had been still and flat, like she was holding herself together. I swore and followed her into the hallway, but stopped when I saw Amanda and three other people peering out of their offices, alarmed by my shouting. The looks on their faces were not friendly. There was an understandably low tolerance for men who shouted at women in this building. On top of feeling angry and depressed at whatever bile Julie had pulled out of me, I also felt like a creep. Maybe for an encore I could kick a door down or tip over a water cooler on my way out.
Julie had disappeared around a corner. I walked down the hall. It was time to go.
“Are you okay?” Amanda asked as I walked past her. “Marty?”
“I’m fine.”
“How did that fall apart so quickly?” she said. “You were in there for two minutes.”
“Just lucky, I guess,” I said over a shoulder as I walked out.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Caitlin was nervous.
It wasn’t any one thing; it was the combination of the flipping of the hair, the quick glances at her phone, the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Things getting rough at the office?” I asked. We were back at the convention center, sitting on the strange cushioned bench again, but apparently even this wasn’t far enough away from her bosses at Tartikoff and Brentwood.
“It’s getting really freaky,” she admitted. “External email was shut down a few days ago. We can only communicate inside the office. And they started searching bags at the end of the day, which is really bumming everyone out. It takes twenty minutes to get out of the building.”
“How’d you smuggle Gerson’s day planner out?”
She smiled and for an answer, reached into her handbag and pulled out a tampon box.
“Nice job,” I said. “Though a female guard isn’t going to think twice about looking in there.”
“Maybe not,” she said, “but I’ve been an attorney’s bitch long enough to know that if they open this box they’ve got a lawsuit on their hands. And they know it, too.”
“I really appreciate this, Caitlin,” I said. “We’re closing in on something and a big chunk of it is thanks to you.”
She smiled again and blushed a teeny bit. “Thanks. But I can’t do this much longer. I’m starting to wig out that they’re videotaping me, or bugging my phone, or something.”
“I know. Like I said, we’re getting close. The day planner might have some answers.”
“I can’t let you take it,” she said, handing it over. “I’m first person they’re going to think of if they find it missing.”
“Give me fifteen, twenty minutes to leaf through it. We’ll get you back to the office before lunchtime is over.” She nodded, looking subdued. I opened the little book. “Looks like a diary, not a day planner.”
“She tried using one with dates and times, but didn’t like that some days were almost empty, others too full. So she just started buying blank journals and putting the date at the start of the entry.”
“So she could fill in as much or as little as she needed.”
“Right.”
I started flipping through pages, eyeballing dates. “Still looks like she only used a line or two per day. That’ll help. But there must be weeks—no, months—here. What’s a good starting point?”
Caitlin leaned over and turned the pages until we were about a third of the way through the planner. “Here’s where I found out about that guy Zimmerman.”
I started from there, scanning the pages and flipping the pages quickly while Caitlin read over my shoulder. The notes were scribbled, jotted down in haste, and most of the entries were single letters and symbols.
“She had her own shorthand?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Caitlin said. She pointed to an entry. “M is for meeting. M with a circle around it is a meeting with a partner or someone else higher up in the firm.”
“Like Alex Montero?”
“Mmm…no, she
didn’t really think of him as her boss,” she said. “She marked meetings with him M-AM. If that’s circled, they both met with a partner or someone else important.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s not complicated. C is for call, the circle is a call to someone senior. L is for lunch. CC is conference call?”
“Yep, though she didn’t always put down who was there. She might if she thought it was important.”
“What about the slash?”
“That was something she added later if it hadn’t gone well or if she didn’t like something else about the call or meeting.”
My phone buzzed and I pulled it out reflexively to check the number. It was Julie. A flush started around my nose and zipped up to my forehead. My thumb hovered over the screen, ready to answer.
“Somebody important?” Caitlin asked.
“No,” I said, and silenced the call, then slipped the phone back in my pocket. I flipped more pages, trying to wade through weeks of a workaholic corporate attorney’s schedule. In under fifteen minutes, no less. Flip, flip. Scan. Ten minutes passed and I didn’t see anything that jumped out at me. Caitlin sighed several times, simultaneously bored and anxious.
“Why don’t you start at the back?” Caitlin finally asked after her longest sigh.
“It’s tempting,” I said. “But I want to get a sense of her days. Look for patterns. We’ll be done soon.”
She sighed again and I started turning pages faster. Wendy Gerson had packed the planner almost full. Flip, flip, flip. Then my hand froze in midair as I went to turn the page. A morning entry, 10:00 a.m. M -TJ with a circle around the letters. And an angry slash through all of it and into the entry above.
“Holy…” I said out loud. “She met with her.”
“Who?” Caitlin asked.
I sighed and glanced over. “Tonya Jackson. The woman who wouldn’t sell her house to let the Quarters development go through.”
“It didn’t work out?”
I shook my head, seeing the entire scene encapsulated by those three simple letters and a slash. “She turned her down. Gerson probably went there personally to buy her out after Zimmerman got the door slammed in his face. And Jackson told her no, too.”
Several meetings and calls followed, including one M-AM around noon. “She met with Montero to tell him the bad news. Where’s the M with a circle around it, though? Wouldn’t they have wanted to take this upstairs?”
Caitlin shrugged and I scanned the lines, going slower now, trying to make sense of time as it slipped backwards and forwards through Wendy Gerson’s life. Two lines later, a C-AM with a circle and next to it, in parentheses, the letters JR. I whistled.
“She and Mr. Montero called someone together?” Caitlin guessed.
“Not just someone,” I said. “The only JR that makes sense here is Jeremy Rheinsfeld.”
End of the day. I flipped the page. More work history for a busy corporate attorney. Then, halfway through the day, an entry: CH/RM-TJ. Three or four angry slashes nearly obliterated the letters.
I tapped the initials, thinking. CH…then my blood went cold. Cedric Harmon? I’d never caught Martinez’s first name, but it would be easy to find out if it was Raul or Ramón or Rick. I groaned.
“What?” Caitlin asked.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Your old boss couldn’t buy the old lady out, so she went running to Rheinsfeld. Who then sent two scumbag knee breakers to talk some sense into her.”
I pulled out my phone and dialed Dods’s number.
He answered. “Hey, Marty. You get attacked again?”
“I wish, actually,” I said. “Hey, can you run down a death cert for me?”
“Homicide?”
“Not yet. Natural causes.”
“Name?”
“Jackson, Tonya.” I rattled off the street address. “I just need a date and time, if they got it.”
“Okay, I’ll call you back.”
I hung up. I didn’t like where this was going. I went back to the day planner and ran my finger down the page. More meetings, calls, lunches. Several were with Montero, others with higher-ups, but I couldn’t pin any special significance to the entries. Weeks went by with the same pattern. I flipped the page.
The last written page was dated the day she’d been killed. Early in the morning, there was an exclamation mark with a box around it. I showed it to Caitlin.
“Know what this is?”
She glanced at it, then shook her head, confused. “No. I never saw her use that before. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. The rest of the morning and lunch hours were as chock-full of appointments as the rest of the book. The last entry was for 2:30 p.m. It stood out. There was an M with not one, but three circles around it. I held the book up to Caitlin. “Who rates three circles?”
She shrugged and I stared at the entry for a long time. So long that Caitlin leaned in and said, “Was it important?”
“Hmm?” I said, distracted.
“It was an important meeting, right?”
“Oh, it was important.”
“How do you know?”
I tapped the circled M with my finger. “Because that’s who killed her.”
Pots the size of bass drums, when dropped onto a drying rack, make a sound like a church bell. But I had trouble concentrating on the sound because the steam from the industrial washing machine and the spray from volunteers rinsing dishes made the air feel like a hot soup. And that, I also found, was difficult to focus on because the constant hustle of bodies bringing new dirty dishes in and taking others full of food out to the hall made it impossible to stand in one place, begin a conversation, or even hold on to a thought, no matter how hard I tried.
On any given day, Libby’s Kitchen served meals to about five hundred homeless men, women, and children and all five hundred seemed to be here tonight. I’d been to the kitchen before—to pick up snitches or put the bracelets on a suspect; not to volunteer, I’m ashamed to say—and I’d never seen it so busy.
It was also the last place I thought I’d find Paul Gerson making his civic contribution. Writing a check or hosting a fundraiser at the Mayflower Hotel, sure, but not actually wearing a stained apron and dragging plastic racks of glasses in from the hall and loading them into the washer. After much cajoling on my part, his office had told me about his monthly volunteer work and I’d driven down to see for myself.
Weaving my way through the long tables, I passed through rows of homeless folks waiting patiently for their turn to go to the counter. A volunteer stopped me before I’d made it to the kitchen, but when I dropped the Gerson name, I was ushered into the chaos and directed to go back to the sinks.
Gerson was blank-faced when he first saw me, a look that quickly changed to irritation. “You couldn’t call?” he asked as I walked over to him, interrupting as he lifted three racks of clean plates out of the automatic dryer and setting them down on a tower of ten others with a clatter. He had on a pink, pin-striped button-down beneath the same stained apron as everyone else wore. I had to give him credit, though; the sleeves were rolled to the elbow and he was sweating like hell.
“There’ve been some breakthroughs in your sister’s case,” I said, “and I wanted to get in touch with you personally.”
“You couldn’t wait?”
“If I could’ve, I would’ve,” I said, not happy at the attitude. “Look, is there a quiet place we can talk?”
“Hold on,” he said, then walked to a middle-aged Hispanic woman who, though as sweaty and fatigued as everyone else, seemed to be some kind of manager. He explained something, she nodded, then he waved me towards a thick utility door in the back. We wound our way through counters, food cartons, and carts. Gerson grabbed a fly swatter off a nail on the wall, then held the door for me. I found myself in an alley behind the kitchen. The air was blessedly cool, if rank from the garbage cans surrounding the exit, and the noise was a manageable city d
in.
Gerson followed me out, then jammed the fly swatter into the door latch to keep it from locking behind us. He turned in time to see my appraising look. “Surprised to find me volunteering at a soup kitchen?”
“I pictured your philanthropy to be more along the lines of a charity golfing event.”
He dragged his sleeves across his forehead, trying to find one last dry patch to wipe the sweat away. “Mother always insisted we pay back to the community, and the more the hands-on, the better. Wendy hated it.” He shook his head, as if clearing it of a memory. “What’s this about, Singer?”
“I feel like I’m closing in on something. It may lead us to Wendy’s killer or it might not, but either way, I wanted to update you.”
“You didn’t answer me inside. You couldn’t phone this in or wait to catch me in my office?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
I described most of what I’d found to this point, from the dry paper chase at the Records Office to the Columbia Heights press conference to the pissing contest with Rheinsfeld and his goons.
“It sounds like you’re making progress,” he said, “but you still could’ve sent that in an email.”
I hesitated. “Look, I’m pulling on a string here. And the string is tied to various things and people. The more I pull, the longer I pull, the uglier the things are that are tied to that string.”
“Christ, Singer,” Gerson said, fatigue in his voice. “Spill it.”
I put my head back, looking at the thin patch of night sky the alley allowed. “Understand that, in my book, murder is never justified. Whoever killed Wendy needs to be found and get put away. Period.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said wryly.
“But your sister wasn’t just working with some bad people doing some bad things,” I continued. “She was one of the bad people doing the bad things. If this were five years ago, I’d be investigating her, not just the person who killed her.”