by Andrew Case
He was holding out the paperwork as though maybe she would like to confirm what it said. She nodded to him and waved him off. He slipped it back into his bag and smiled.
“Okay, Dad, I hear you. I’ll call the accountant today and we’ll get you a number. And then we’ll figure out how to raise it.” Her mind was already racing ahead, putting together a plan. In trying times you resort to whatever you need.
“I’m sure you will figure something out.” And the hat, the overcoat, the briefcase were all being shuffled away as he turned back toward the wall of windows and disappeared into the light.
“I’m sure I will too.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Detective Mulino leaned back in his chair as Peralta paged through her memo book. She had written everything down, at least. A witness had said Manny Reeves had come into the building with someone else. But Peralta wasn’t offering anything more. She needed a little prodding.
“So what did this other guy look like?”
She kept paging through the memo book. Mulino looked over his desk. The paperwork had started to come in over the weekend, and it was getting out of hand. Filings from the real estate company with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the witness reports Peralta and Bruder had compiled on the day of the incident, and background reports on both Valiant and Reeves. All of it had made its way to Mulino’s office and collected itself into small mountains across his desk. He would get to it this afternoon. He would have to make a phone call to Chief Travis once he had taken it all in.
He was torn about that. If the guy in the hospital were to die, then the case starts looking an awful lot like a double murder. And while OCCB might be able to investigate an accident and hang on to it once it looks intentional, the Homicide Division doesn’t much care for other people investigating multiples. But as long as Bruder hadn’t called from the hospital, Mulino had to assume that either Reeves was alive and unconscious or Bruder had fallen asleep himself. Either was a possibility. Mulino watched as Peralta paged carefully through her memo book. She had found her notes about the witness description.
“She said he was an older guy. White. Maybe sixty. A little stooped. Seemed very buddy-buddy with Reeves on the way up. Nothing about how he was dressed.”
“Did you ask?”
Peralta turned another page in the memo book without saying anything. She would make an okay detective someday. But it was going to take a little work. She looked back up at Mulino, all of a sudden the teenager who got caught taking her father’s car out for the night.
“No.”
“You only get one chance to get a witness’s first impression. You gotta get everything you can from your first five minutes.”
“I understand. I didn’t want to intrude too long. It’s not a lot of fun for any of those people to live in that building.”
“He’s squeezing them out so that he can flip the building.”
Peralta looked up. “No, I don’t think so. That’s not what Evangeline said. She said the building is full. It stays full. Always new people coming in. They get vouchers from Homeless Services and are supposed to get housed there instead of shelters. There are only a dozen or so permanent tenants. The rest are in and out every few months.”
That would make the owner worse than even your typical slum lord. Instead of trying to push people out by keeping the place in disrepair, he was profiting on a steady state of misery. Collect rent from the city and skimp on everything. The tenants won’t even protest; they’ll be out soon enough. You have to keep it worse than a shelter or when their number comes up, they won’t want to leave.
“So we’ve got Reeves coming in with a man who was in his sixties, white, anything else? Guy have a beard? The two of them say anything?”
“They were talking to each other. They sounded like they knew each other. But she couldn’t make out the words.”
And to be fair to Peralta, this tenant wouldn’t have seen much more, hunched at her peephole, trying to keep tabs on the comings and goings like a typical neighborhood snoop.
“This woman know the owner of the building? She would have recognized the owner if she’d seen him?”
“Neither of the guys was someone she’d seen before.”
“But that’s not the same question, is it, Detective?”
Peralta’s nose was back in her memo book, trying to find the answers to questions she hadn’t asked. It was better than Bruder, though. He would have come back with a marijuana collar and no intel on Reeves at all, and thought he’d done a great job.
There was a knock at the office door. Mulino looked up through the narrow glass partition to see Leonard Mitchell. He tilted his chin to Peralta. “Can you let him in?”
Mulino could see Peralta’s worry as she stood and opened the door. Talking PD business in front of a civilian was frowned upon. Discussing an open investigation was unacceptable. She would probably steam over and explode if he didn’t explain to her what was actually going on. She opened the door and Mitchell, looking thinner than usual, in the same dull suit as always, nodded to her and stepped in.
“Have a seat, Leonard.” Peralta wasn’t even looking at him. She’d closed the memo book, as though maybe he’d look over her shoulder like he was cheating on a high school math test. Mitchell settled into the other chair across from Mulino’s desk, the shoulders of his suit folding upward as he did so. He had a thick envelope of paperwork under his arm. Mulino hoped it wasn’t going to be added to the piles on his desk.
“Detective Peralta, I want to explain something to you and I expect you to understand it is in confidence. For your safety, for mine, and for the integrity of the investigation. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Detective, I understand.” Peralta was a good soldier and if Mulino gave her a direct order it would stick. He went on.
“I have engaged Mr. Mitchell as a civilian investigator in the Valiant case. He has infiltrated Hill and Associates. They think of him as their chief of operations. I have my suspicions about Eleanor Hill. But I don’t roll up to her father’s church with my gun out. We go about this the right way. So when you talk to Mr. Mitchell, what you tell him is in confidence and what he tells you is in confidence. And that means more to him than it does to you. He’s the one who is in potential danger. Do you get that?”
Peralta looked Leonard over. Mulino could tell what she was seeing. Just another guy who spent most of his work life sitting at a desk looking at a computer screen. To most detectives, the only real investigations are the ones that take place on the street; there is no need to respect the guys that go through the paperwork. Forensic accountants, fraud investigators, personnel officers: they are all basically support staff. So Peralta was trying to figure out, Mulino could tell, whether or not this guy was worthy of her respect, or just another paper pusher. Plus he had been at DIMAC. Whatever Mulino told her, whatever she told him, she would eventually make up her own mind.
“I get it.”
“So, Leonard, is that thick envelope another report for me? You go through and pull their tax returns?”
“You’re off the hook, Detective. This is my paperwork. I’m headed to DCAS after this to put in my papers.”
“Working for us doesn’t count as continuation of city service?”
“Technically, I think this is freelancing. And it doesn’t matter anyway. I made my twenty and I’m not under the illusion you’re going to pay me enough to move my number.”
“Fair enough. So what did you find?”
Leonard looked over to Peralta. He was sizing her up too. No wonder, given what happened to him last year. Once he had learned about Davenport’s death, the ring of cops that killed her had turned its sights on him. And they almost succeeded. It was understandable that he would be wary. Peralta was green, but she was as clean as they come. Mulino followed Leonard’s gaze to the other detective and nodded.
“She’s on the team, Leonard. You can say whatever you’re going to say.”
It wouldn’t surprise Mulino. It looked simple enough to make a killing putting up condos in Brooklyn from the outside, but business is business, after all. And anyone in business needs to have an edge. Given even the above-board prices in Brooklyn nowadays, no one would ever stop and ask if you were in fact playing the pump-and-dump instead.
“You see anything else? Anything from city agencies? Federal? HUD or anyone else?”
“I was only there one day. They had me host an open house yesterday. With a tenant in place who the buyer is going to have to kick out.”
“At least they let you hit the ground running.”
“I suppose so.”
“And you’ve got a list, I suppose, of the buyers who are at the end of the chain in all this? The ones holding the land after it’s finally bid up too high?”
Leonard slipped out a single sheet of paper from his envelope. “Of course. These are the names of the entities, the managing agents, the countries of incorporation. I figure you guys could run it down from here.”
Mulino took the paper and gestured to Peralta. You see? Her eyes were dull. Maybe she wouldn’t even pick up the lesson. Mulino had to give it all the same. Don’t talk to the boss until you have something actionable to show.
“Thanks, Leonard. Detective, could you run this down? See if we know anything more about any of these groups? Try the warrants database, call someone in the Fraud Division and see if they can help you out.”
She nodded. Mulino hoped she’d have better luck with Frauds than Bruder did with TARU. It was tough, teaching these kids what to do. They thought they had made detective because they were good investigators. But they had been promoted only because they had the potential to learn. They didn’t actually know anything yet. Peralta stared hard at the paper.
Mulino picked up the filings from his own desk and set them in front of Leonard. “Leonard, I’ve got a present right back for you. This is all the paperwork from HPD, DOB, Finance, anywhere we could find something on your friends at Hill and Associates. Let’s see if there is anything more we need to track down.”
“Okay.” Mulino could tell Leonard was disappointed. No one wants to be the guy with the stack of papers to wade through. But he wasn’t about to protest, now that he had quit his job. And he would know that it made sense for him to do the background on Hill, to synch it up with what he was doing there. As Leonard sized up the stacks in front of him, Mulino’s phone went off. He looked down at it. It was Detective Bruder. This ought to be interesting.
“Hello, Detective. How are things at the hospital?”
“I just figured I should call you. The guy that fell down the air shaft. Mr. Reeves? He just woke up.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Adam Davenport was out of breath. He had run two blocks down Underhill after double-parking. Normally Adam picked Henry up from the afterschool program at five, or even six. But today he was getting him right when school let out, at two-forty. Today they were both going to talk to the woman that Henry called “that nice lady.” Because Adam hadn’t taught his seven-year-old the words “grief counsellor” yet. And right at two-forty, the school was mobbed. You couldn’t get a space in front of the school, and Adam realized that he had put on enough weight that running even a block and a half left him winded.
That nice lady. Sessions with the counselor were the only times Henry would even mention his mother. The counselor had told Adam to take it slow, to not impose a timetable on the boy. He will come around when he comes around. So once a week they sat in the office and Henry would say very sweet things about how he missed his mom, and Adam would hold his son’s arm, and the boy sometimes would cry. And the rest of the week Henry would bite his nails, pick at the green plastic wristband his mother had given him, or wake up at two in the morning screaming.
By the time Adam reached the school, the noise came from all directions. Kids were pouring out of the building from the front and side, and swarming over the playground behind. Parents of kindergartners gingerly guided their precious ones down the front steps as the middle-school kids zoomed past, hoping to be the first ones to buy a pack of Skittles at the bodega down the street. The traffic was nearly at a standstill in both directions. A line of cars was double-parked up St. Marks, and most of the way along Underhill as well.
Henry’s class let out on a side entrance, along St. Marks. The teacher would open the door and the kids would stream out toward a crowd of parents huddled behind an iron fence. When Adam got there, the crowd was thinning. The teacher stood still, guarding the three or four remaining students. The bulk of the parents and babysitters were shuffling away with kids who were issuing practiced whines for ice cream and cupcakes. Adam stood at the entrance to the gate and scanned the last four kids’ faces. He knew them: Amelia, Compson, Lillian, Clyde. Antique names had been trending across the tonier parts of Brooklyn for years. But his son wasn’t there. He looked up at the teacher.
“Is Henry here?”
A blank look. The teacher looked down, counting the boys again. She looked up at Adam. “He was here. Did he go to the playground?”
The school’s playground was a flat concrete yard that had been repaved and repainted as soon as white people started moving to the neighborhood. Now it had two basketball courts, bright outlines of a soccer field, and surrounding it all, dark red lanes for an eighth-of-a-mile track. After school, some parents would hover by the fences and stare at their phones while their children wore themselves out for an easy bedtime. Henry was allowed to hit the playground without his father. Most kids weren’t. But Adam had never been a hoverer. And the grief counselor had said that a little independence would be good for the boy.
Adam nodded. The yard was louder than the school. There was a soccer game going on. Festooned in kits from European clubs, the six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds swarmed and dove, unafraid of the pavement below. They were still mobbing the ball; no one had taught them how to play the game properly, what separated it from tag. But they were having great fun.
Adam slipped past the lower exit to the school and turned into the playground toward the soccer game. He made out a couple of Henry’s friends. Leander. Hopper. He didn’t see Henry, but it was a big crowd still. Up the steps and toward the yelping fray of children. He stopped at the edge of the game. He counted through the bodies. He didn’t see his son. For the first time, he had a hint of worry. He looked over the rest of the playground. There were older kids playing basketball, girls playing hopscotch, kindergartners swarming the unbreakable play structure. It felt suddenly much colder than it was outside. For a moment he thought he would go back and ask the teacher again. Leander scored a goal. Adam walked up to him and put his hand on the boy’s arm.
“Leander, did Henry come play with you? Is Henry here?”
The boy looked up with wide empty eyes, a bit of sweat creeping into his broad blonde mop of hair.
“Henry. Henry was here. He was playing with us.”
“Where is he? Did he get hurt? Is he at the nurse’s office?”
The boy cocked his head in thought.
“He was playing. Someone came to talk to him. He came and called out his name. Henry went with him. I thought it was his dad.”
“I’m his dad, Leander, you know me.”
And nothing from the boy. Why would there be? If Henry had gone to speak to some grownup, the other c
hildren wouldn’t question it. The children are always being picked up by babysitters, uncles, and stepparents. Some have two dads. Some have two sets of parents. They are not each other’s keepers. Leander was tugging away from Adam, trying to get back to his game. If Adam kept holding him, the boy’s own mother might come scold him, if she could look up from her tablet long enough. Adam released the boy into the marauding crowd. He tried to think who could have come by to get the boy for him. What a stranger could have told Henry to make him come along. Nothing. And again nothing. And then a flash of what happened to Christine, why they had spent a year with his parents in New Jersey. How he had convinced himself that it was wrong to be afraid and that he ought to come back to the city and out of hiding. And now this. And what this might mean was suddenly too horrible to imagine.
He stopped and turned to look back toward the school. A heavy, brick complex, three stories, walled with makeshift air conditioners and metal bars added to the windows sometime in the 1970s. A building that had gone up as a symbol of efficiency and utility, and like most of the city that it had lived through, had sunk slowly into fear.
He could barely hear the buzz of the sport around him. The parents huddled by the edge of the playground were, like he had been fifteen minutes before, oblivious to the danger of the world. They were happy in their bubbles. Adam, already living with the greatest loss he thought he would ever know, felt as though his whole life was suddenly a scab that had been ripped off and had started to bleed. Someone had come for his family, again. He fell to his knees on the cement playground. There was no noise, no crowd, no comfort that could slow his collapse. He moaned as he dropped, and barely had the energy to raise his arms to break his fall as he faded from consciousness and smacked the ground.