Restoration Heights

  “Y’all got started early today, didn’t you?”

  Beth giggled. “‘Y’all.’”

  Reddick, seeing how much ground he needed to make up, poured himself a shot of bourbon and grabbed a beer before joining them in the living room.

  “Hit The Rookery around four,” Dean said.

  “And you’ve been drinking ever since?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, we ate dinner in the middle somewhere,” Beth said.

  Reddick got the sense that his presence in the apartment had derailed something—or at least postponed it. Beth turned toward him, the radiating glow of six hours’ worth of alcohol fixed to him like a spotlight. Dean had yet to look up; he didn’t seem annoyed, just lazy, tired. He rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. They were both drinking water, a kind of surrender.

  “You know who was there?” Beth didn’t wait for him to answer. “Sarah.”

  Reddick waited, expectant. “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t know you went out with her this week.”

  “I wouldn’t say we went out. She was helping me with something.”

  “She said the same thing but, you know, she’s not seeing that guy, what was his name?” She tapped Dean, who shrugged. “Whoever. She’s not seeing him anymore, is what I’m saying.”

  “Yeah, I got that, it’s just—you know, I’m busy right now.” It was the worst excuse, one even he didn’t believe, but he was too acutely sober to talk about his dating life. He upended his beer, emptied a quarter of it.

  Beth realized he was brushing her off and rolled her eyes. “Ugh. Look, today was a fun day, and she was there, and you weren’t. I’m just saying.”

  Dean interrupted them, still intent on his phone. “Did Lane call you about working this weekend?” Reddick nodded. “Good. I told him to. I figured you could use the money by now.”

  “I told him I’d do it. You weren’t interested?”

  “I’ve just got too much work to do in my studio. I said if he couldn’t get anyone else.”

  “I’m surprised you answered the phone. I mean, in your condition.”

  Dean glanced up at him, grinned. “He called early.”

  “Ha ha. So you guys had a good time? What got you started?”

  “We were celebrating,” Beth said.

  “Really?”

  “Well—there’s nothing to celebrate yet.” Dean put his phone down, finally engaged.

  “We were celebrating the possibility,” Beth said. “The hope.”

  “Hope?”

  “No, that’s too vague. I meant... I meant...”

  “Potential.”

  “Yes!”

  Reddick downed the shot, hit the beer. “Still vague, you guys.”

  “I thought we were ‘y’all.’”

  Reddick waited, silent, hoping the whiskey would rinse away his gathering irritation.

  “We had a guest today, in our studios,” Dean said.

  “Mara Jost.”

  It took Reddick a moment. “The dealer.”

  “Yeah.” Beth seemed incredulous that he hadn’t jumped at the name. “Gorgeous space in Chelsea?”

  “I know it, I know it. I saw—some show there last fall.”

  “Everyone she represents is amazing.”

  “And?” Reddick asked.

  “She liked our work!”

  Dean nodded. “She did. Both of us.”

  “She didn’t offer anything yet.”

  “She didn’t not offer, though.”

  “Exactly. She was purposefully ambiguous. But in a good way. I mean, a way that felt good. Just very...positive. Like, positive energy.”

  “I’m still hungry,” Dean said. He got up and walked into the kitchen. “She represents Caleb—on the fifth floor? Who I guess has been talking up my work. She saw some pieces online, came down, and Beth was in there with me.”

  “So we started talking up my work.”

  “Your jewelry?” Reddick asked, confused.

  They looked at him like he was a dense child.

  “My videos.”

  He had completely forgotten that she began making videos last year. She had learned the software in college and did freelance editing and production—mostly under the table for friends—when she needed the extra income. Eventually she decided to try making her own stuff—blends of stop-motion animation and performance, layered and twisted as one of her intricate rings.

  “And she comes over, watches all three of them.”

  “So what we’re saying is that this has a lot of potential.” Dean opened the cabinet, shut it, opened the refrigerator and removed a beer.

  “If for no other reason than just forming that relationship.”

  “Then, congratulations, guys.” Reddick smiled and raised his bottle. Dean sat down, raised his own, and they clacked the heels together. Beth caught them both with her glass of water as they were separating.

  “To potential.”

  “So what have you been up to today?” Dean said.

  Reddick began slowly. He told them about his confrontation with Franky, the phone, about breaking into the townhouse, his pursuit of the other trespasser at Restoration Heights. Halfway through Dean began to frown. Reddick finished and turned to Beth, hoping for support—but she just looked afraid. They both seemed vastly more sober than when he began.

  Reddick got up and opened another beer.

  “How many buildings are you going to break into before you’re satisfied?” Dean said. “You have to stop.”

  “I can’t believe you did this again.”

  “It was a different situation entirely. It’s not like anyone lives there.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like you just slipped through an unlocked window, either,” Dean said. “I mean, you had to break through the wood.”

  “I put it back.”

  “You say things like that as though it makes anything better,” Beth said. “What you did, what you’re doing—it isn’t okay. You don’t get to do whatever you want just because you’re on some self-appointed mission.”

  “It’s not self-appointed. Mrs. Leland asked me—”

  “To ask questions,” Dean said. “Not to trespass, not to steal someone’s phone. And all for what? Some game?”

  “This isn’t—I’m not playing a game.” All his irritation came flooding back. Franky was obviously a villain, Buckley’s behavior was undeniably strange—and a person was missing, probably dead. Add to that what he had just learned from Derek, that Buckley was connected to Restoration Heights, to the deepest cut this wounded neighborhood had sustained—it had to be blown open, all of it. He felt a burning frustration that they couldn’t see it.

  “He’s right, Dean. It’s not a game.” Beth turned to Reddick. “What you did today was serious.”

  “It should be serious. What I did was appropriate, was the response that this case deserves.”

  “It’s not a case.”

  “A person is missing.”

  Beth, almost whispering, “You are going to end up in jail. For harassing that guy, for all of it.”

  “He deserved it, Beth.”

  “How do you know that, though?” Dean asked. “You don’t know anything for certain.”

  “I was investigating. I was going where the case told me to go.”

  “What about those two guys at the party?”

  “I’m investigating them, too. This was just one day. I think—to be honest, I think they’re all connected somehow.”

  “Like what, they work for Buckley or something?”

  “I don’t think it’s that straightforward.”

  “Dean, stop encouraging him. You’re going to get him killed.”

  “I’m not trying to encourage him. It’s just—Reddick, I don’t think you c
an trust your instincts. I understand why you’re hesitant to put it on the guys at the party, they’re black and you’re resisting this inherited pressure to view them, I mean people of color, as criminals—but the way you’re hounding this developer, it isn’t right. It’s just resentment or worse, I don’t know, bitterness. You see him as an interloper and you want to make him into a villain. You want to pretend that he’s motivated by something more sinister than economic self-interest.”

  “Why does everyone think that? Because I protested Restoration Heights?”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Look, I get that you’re passionate about this stuff.”

  “Passionate? Fuck, man. Because I don’t want to watch yet another neighborhood get blasted into a gluten-free, au pair, hip white wasteland?” Mocking now, in a voice that was half Buckley, half Hannah, “This building has so much potential. We’ll put a SoulCycle right here on the bottom floor, which will leave just enough room for a juice bar. And on top a lovely restaurant where we take classic American dishes but make them, like, actually good. You know, white trash but artisan.” Lapsing back into his own voice, shaking. “Coleslaw, thirty bucks a pound because the cabbage was hand-raised by trust-fund interns and fed nothing but Oregon rainwater. Grass-fed livermush. On the third floor we’ll just put some offices, a company headquarters, dog-friendly, where everyone can sit around on vintage couches and talk seriously about pop music. That sounds so amazing. Why do I even fight it? Hold my beer, I’ll just go paint the brownstones white and be done with it.”

  Dean was calm. “You’re proving my point, Reddick. Look how angry this makes you. This is why you want him to be a murderer. This is why you are acting so irresponsibly.”

  “I do want to protect the neighborhood. Obviously. But I’m being objective here, too. Because Hannah matters. What happened to her matters.”

  Beth’s eyes narrowed, her fear and shock beginning to give way to something else. “This is all kind of gross. It’s very entitled. It’s very...it’s just so white male, as though this is all your responsibility somehow. Like you’re the neighborhood’s steward, and if you don’t look out for it, no one will.”

  “What does that have to do with any of this?”

  “I didn’t see it before but it’s true. You’re on some Rudyard Kipling shit. The way you think this has anything to do with you, that you have to ride in with, like, a gun or sword or whatever and save everyone.”

  “Gun or sword?”

  “Yeah. Just your presumption. You wouldn’t have gotten away with any of this if you weren’t white. And you wouldn’t care about Hannah if you weren’t a man, if you didn’t feel this manly responsibility to take care of women. It’s very...”

  “Don’t say problematic.”

  “It is, though. I’m not joking.”

  “I’m trying to figure out how all of this makes me racist and sexist.”

  “That isn’t what I’m saying and you know it. You learned this stuff in school same as I did. I’m talking about the social structure we live in. Systems.”

  “I busted my ass today. Trying to help someone. A person.” He held up his finger. “One individual. That’s what this is about—a person, not a system. Hannah, and finding out who killed her.”

  “And how do you even know she’s dead? I’m sorry if I just don’t buy all this. It doesn’t make sense. Everyone wants to help someone, you know? We come across people every day that we could help and don’t, not the way we should. Why her? Why choose her, is what I’m saying?”

  “Because I was there.”

  “Come on, Reddick, calm down.” Dean cut his eyes at Beth. “She’s right. You have to think about how this looks to someone who doesn’t share our privileges. There’s a kind of, I don’t know, moral grandstanding to it.”

  Reddick lost it, finally overwhelmed by frustration, fueled by a surge of fresh alcohol. “What the fuck are you talking about? Do you know me at all? Privileges? We have nothing in common. You understand that? Nothing.”

  Beth interjected. “You might come from different backgrounds but you’re in the same place right now. You’re roommates.”

  “Beth, where the fuck do your parents live?”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “I’m not being an asshole. I’m asking a question. Just tell me where the fuck your parents live.”

  “Bradenton.”

  “Doing what, exactly? Hold up, hold up, I know this one. Tenured professors at New College. How about you, Dean?”

  “I’m not playing this game, man.”

  “Some fucking suburb outside of Annapolis. I can’t even remember what your dad does but your mom doesn’t have a job. She could if she wanted, but who has the time? She has interests.”

  The two of them leaned back in their chairs, exchanged looks, disarmed by his rage.

  “Guess what my dad does. Go ahead.” Silence. “I wish you could fucking tell me because it’s not like I know. My mom doesn’t know, either. She hasn’t spoken to him since he quit the mill when I was six months old. I’ve got photos. I’ve got a pawpaw that I almost remember and a grandmama that still sends checks to the woman who was never even officially her daughter-in-law. So go ahead and talk to me about privileges. Talk to me about these advantages I have. Tell me again about how we are in the same place.”

  “Stop taking this personally,” Beth said. “We’re talking about systemic advantages—”

  “You sound like a fucking textbook. This isn’t theory, this is real fucking life. This is looking people in the face. Do you think that having these opinions makes you noble? You spend so much time fighting the way the world is, the things that are wrong with it, that you forget to actually connect with the people who live in it. Unplug your computer and go hang out with people, regular people, black, white, whatever—people who don’t know who fucking bell hooks is and whose parents couldn’t get them into the tiny circle of private schools where you learned your opinions. I mean hang out, not be their ally, or march at their rallies, just go have a beer, without an agenda, without patting yourself on the back because you know you’ve done your duty as a good little white liberal.”

  “White liberal?”

  “Give me a break, Beth. You’re as white as I am.”

  “That is the most bullshit racist stereotype—just because Asian people have done well in this country, all of a sudden we’re white?”

  “Well, you’re not fucking black.”

  “Neither are you.” Shouting, her face contorted.

  “You know what I am, though, Beth? Fucking poor. You don’t know what that’s like.”

  “That doesn’t mean you get to erase my heritage.”

  “What is your heritage? What is it? It’s good fucking schools and tutors and after-school programs. It’s having a support network. It’s great skin and hair and teeth because your parents didn’t feed you out of boxes and cans. It’s speaking Mandarin and English and passable Spanish that you learned during your semester abroad. It’s success, Beth. That’s your heritage. All your talk about structure and systems, about gender and race—how could any of those things possibly hurt you? What’s the worst thing you’ve ever encountered? You’re underrepresented in movies? Somebody speaks to you like you’re an idiot because they assume you don’t understand the language? I’m so sorry. Sit in your parents’ BMW and cry about it. Put on Brahms until you feel better. It’s easy to spot all the world’s problems from the top floor.”

  Beth—stunned, hurt—mocking: “I’m Reddick, I grew up with black people and my family was poor so none of your bullshit applies to me.” Back to her own voice, angry and firm. “Money doesn’t erase everything. It doesn’t help when you find out you only got your internship because your boss has an Asian fetish, when he treats you like some sort of sexual treasure. It doesn’t make me l
ess afraid to be alone on the subway at night. I don’t get to buy my way out of prejudice. You think you’re so fucking unique, such an individual, but you’re not, no one is.”

  Reddick stood up and walked into the kitchen. “That’s just the problem, though. You know? I am an individual, just like you. Just like every single person out there. And you can slice us up by whatever standards you want, by gender or age or ethnicity, by skin color, and you can learn something. You can map trends or uncover injustice or—I don’t know, design fucking policy. But every last one of those data points is a person. A real human being. They have history you can’t know, fears and hopes and troubles you don’t have a category for. Maybe your labels are worth it. Maybe in the end they do more good than harm. But that doesn’t mean much to the people you stick them to.”

  Beth, unbowed, had a reply ready, but Reddick didn’t hear it. He went into his room and shut the door.

  Twelve

  To the warehouse first, on an empty weekend train. His legs stiff from yesterday’s adventures, from lumbering through snow, from being soaked through with this incorrigible winter. Raw from last night’s alcohol and spent emotion. He meant everything he said and regretted all of it; it was an argument he tried never to air. It was too embedded in his own past, in his own experiences, for him to expect anyone to understand. He needed an hour or two on the courts to loosen up, which he wasn’t going to get. He looked for Harold outside the turnstiles and wasn’t surprised when he wasn’t there—all of his relationships deteriorating in the wake of his crusade.

  After the warehouse—a subdued reunion, his coworkers hesitant to prod the wound of his week off—it was the Sewards’. The house seemed unfamiliar. The limestone exterior, the polished stairways, the rugs and sideboards, the just-so spacing of every arrangement, the abundance of effort that was apparent in every room, every nook—the sense that this was a space maintained by commitment and visual acuity—none of it seemed harmless anymore. It had abandoned the pretense of neutrality, become a testament of character, of motive. It vibrated with meaning.