Restoration Heights

  They weren’t planning to be there long—four or five hours, just wrapping up details that the unplanned painting swap had pushed aside. Four paintings in the first floor dining room, a suite of photographs for a hallway upstairs. The dining room was the problem, and had been all week. Dottie had made them rearrange it four times, in each instance unsatisfied with something, the color or the size or some problem with the pattern—too much Leipzig, too clear a historical or conceptual link between whichever four artists were up at the time. Trying to make it work together without seeming like some sort of thesis. Mrs. Seward would have cut off the discussion days ago but she had left the city that morning with her husband, and Dottie’s appetite for nitpicking was insatiable.

  She pulled Reddick aside when they arrived. “You’re only here because there was no one else.”

  “I already told Lane I won’t cause trouble,” he said.

  “This is none of your business. But I’m going to tell you anyway, in hopes that it will help you keep your word. We have heard from Hannah. She apologized for the way she left. She’s gone home to be with her family.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Shortly after the incident.”

  “So Tuesday? Wednesday?” Her timeline didn’t add up—Franky had admitted that Hannah was still missing yesterday morning.

  “What does it matter?” she snapped. “I didn’t have to tell you at all. I only did so because I thought it would help you drop it, so please—drop it.”

  They spent the morning on the dining room, then debated whether to break for lunch or push through and reach their weekend. Reddick voted lunch—it might be his only chance to sneak away. It was an even split—two for and two against—but the tie was broken when Dottie interrupted them again. She pulled them through another walk-through, wondered whether she should send them back to the Sewards’ vault at Lockstone to pick up a painting she regretted removing. Finally she decided that it was too late to make major changes, that it would have to stay as it was, but her indecision swallowed enough time that they were all too hungry to keep going.

  They split up outside, each to grab their food of choice. Reddick lied about where he was going and doubled back to the house. He buzzed the service entrance, hoped that if Dottie answered she wouldn’t bother to ask questions. Other than her initial confrontation she hadn’t spoken to him. A housekeeper let him in, a trim Russian woman he hadn’t seen before. He started to offer an excuse for his return but she was so obviously uninterested that he let it trail off.

  Buckley must have an office or study, but he hadn’t seen it. There was a handful of rooms that weren’t part of the installation, including a few on the third floor, down the hall from Mrs. Seward’s office—he decided to start there. He went up the rear stairs, alert and ready to talk his way out of trouble. Most of the staff was off for the weekend; the empty rooms accepted him with a drowsy disregard. He passed Mrs. Seward’s office and peeked inside. The Schnabel glared at him knowingly. The patches of heavy paint read like concrete, spread over the family’s secrets. Buckley’s parents must have recognized Bed-Stuy as the site of Restoration Heights but had followed their son’s lead in keeping it quiet, a level of trust, of loyalty, that he couldn’t fathom. He imagined his own mother in their place—she would have bared every detail, her naive faith in the truth unshakable. It wouldn’t have occurred to her that his omission was tactical, that he might be hiding something for his own sake. He would have had to explain it all to her first. The Sewards had closed ranks instinctively. He didn’t hate them for it; it was more like wonder, like noting an exceptional trait in some other species.

  He tried two more doors and found Buckley’s office. It shirked the modernist imperative of the rest of the house. Dark wood, low light, Ivy League degrees framed behind a leather-topped desk; it was a room scraping after an outworn masculinity—cigars, brandy, solemnity. It was the only room in the house that was trying too hard. There was a closed laptop on the center of the desk, neat stacks of paperwork around it. Reddick listened. The only thing he heard was the hurried tapping of his own heart. He moved to the desk and opened the laptop.

  It was locked. He wasted a few minutes on desperate, Hail Mary lobs at guessing Buckley’s password—graduation date, Hannah’s name, Franky’s name; the options rote after yesterday’s failure with the phone. He gave up after the first warning and closed it. He went through the stacks of papers, delicately, like he was handling a sheaf of drawings, laying each sheet facedown to preserve the order. There were three pages with the name Corren Capital in the text. He photographed them and replaced the stack. He wanted evidence for either of his theories—the crime of passion or of finance. He believed it might somehow be both. There were four drawers on either side of the desk and one in the center. He opened the center one first. Inside was a messy assortment of office paraphernalia, clips and pens and a stapler. A jump drive that Reddick almost pocketed. Two small keys on a single loop of wire. He tried the other drawers, working left to right, assiduous and careful. He shot photos of anything related to finance, receipts or bills. He didn’t see anything personal, no mentions of Hannah—nothing to indicate a reservoir of jealous rage. It had to leave some trace. A force strong enough to drive someone to kill—it couldn’t have been kept entirely quiet. He didn’t expect the evidence to be dramatic, a photograph with her face carved out, a journal inscribed with his murderous plot—but something.

  If she cheated, how did he know? Did he hire someone to watch her?

  The bottom right drawer had been retrofitted with a lock. Reddick tugged vainly once, twice. He opened the center drawer again and removed the pair of wire-bound keys to try them in the lock. The tumbler crackled and the drawer slid open. Inside was a stack of files, a shoebox and a large leather-bound book. He began with the shoebox. It held several sleeves of photographs, from years ago, shot on film and printed commercially. Nearly everyone in the images was white, attractive and well dressed; catalog families captured in redolent happiness. He recognized teenaged Buckley and a younger Mrs. Seward, her beauty less developed, more superficial, her son already affecting a patrician composure. He saw earlier iterations of this house; different art, different furniture, but the same sense of cohesion and care. On the surface their lives were foreign and inaccessible, galvanized by wealth he didn’t have the means to understand—a class of people that were only ever portrayed as tropes of wish fulfillment or villainy, as subjects for envy or blame—but in these images, beneath the trim clothes and the polished locations, they seemed blandly relatable. They possessed an intimacy that argued for a shared humanity.

  At the bottom of the stack he found a shot of Buckley and Franky, serenely young, posing with another boy in front of what looked like a Gothic manor. Reddick flipped it over, checked the back—“with Franky and Mitchell, freshman year, College Hall,” in Buckley’s machine-like script. Reddick turned it right-side up, studied the image, three princes framed by a mansion of grassy stone. The third boy, Mitchell, was dark-haired and heavy—a vaguely Asian face with a ruddy American grin. Last night’s argument flashed through his mind, Beth’s outrage, and Reddick slipped the photo back into the box and replaced the lid. There was nothing in there he could use.

  He removed the leather book. It was wider than a notebook but thin. He opened it. Side-tear checks, in columns of three, with stubs for recording the amount and the payee. The dates on the stubs were erratic, no more than one every few months, going back over three years. Thirteen in all. There was no pattern; the payees and amounts were different each time. He wondered if any of them were written to a private investigator. He took photographs of the stubs.

  His stomach growled, a reminder that he was working through lunch. He glanced at the time. The rest of the crew would be back soon. He removed the files. Taxes, bank statements—more than he could parse and more than he had time to shoot. He thumbed quickly, looking for Corren Capital, phot
ographing the pages that had its name on them. He didn’t understand any of it. Once he was finished he replaced the files and the checkbook and the shoebox, locked the drawer and returned the keys. He went over the room for signs of his presence, like scanning an artwork for damage after you unwrapped it. He opened the middle drawer, shifted the position of the keys and closed it. No oily fingerprints on the laptop, no hairs. Once he was satisfied the room was clean he left.

  He padded through the hallway and into the service corridor. He heard the rest of the crew being let in through the main entrance and sped up, tried not to lose traction in his blue booties as he hurried down the stairs. He came out in the kitchen, half jogged through the empty dining room on his way to the foyer. He heard Dottie’s voice before he got there.

  “You’re all back? Where’s the other?”

  “Here,” he called, coming into view from the dining room. Dottie frowned but didn’t ask questions.

  “Fine,” she said, and summoned them all upstairs to finish the job.

  * * *

  He was home by four o’clock. He drank coffee and stared at the case map. It was split in half, a reflection of his uneven efforts. On the left he had the Sewards and Franky Dutton. The white surface around them was scrawled with pencil—arrows connecting names and places, jumbled text, smudges of erasure and reconsideration. On the right there were only names floating in empty spaces, begging for his attention. Ju’waun and Tyler. Cask. The map exposed his bias, the core asymmetry that Derek had called him on, that Beth’s prodding had exposed. He had to develop that half, bring it up to the same state as the rest of the map, had to make the two sides speak as equals.

  He had looked for answers only in the places he wanted them to be—which was anywhere but Bed-Stuy. Derek was right that what drew him to the neighborhood was uncomplicated—the pace of life, the commitment to simple courtesies. There was something of Gastonia in it, some essential piece of the South, cleansed of the worst of its history, that survived in the weekly rhythms, in the solace of their continuity. He remembered his mother’s hands trembling when he told her he was going to Philadelphia, that he would accept U-Arts’s offer. She had been as prepared for that moment as he was—the art camp scholarships, the basketball accolades, that year he nearly flunked geometry and she drove him to their second cousin’s house in Charlotte every Sunday, an hour each way, for tutoring he paid for with a portrait of the cousin and her terrier, deftly rendered in graphite—all of the work she put him through had been accompanied by admonitions, by advice on what he should do when his talents pulled him away from her, on how things would be. But she was afraid when the moment arrived. He wondered if she had believed it wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t until he left that he understood what frightened her—that the violence of separation wasn’t softened by the desire to go, or to see him gone. That you could miss a place you desperately wanted to leave.

  He went home when he could afford the plane tickets but he could never move back. It would destroy his mother, crumble her life’s work. Instead he looked for that sense of place in Brooklyn, and found it in Bed-Stuy, in the easy familiarity of strangers, commiserating over headlines while you waited in line at the bodega. Found it in the Caribbean women on folding chairs on the sidewalk, Watchtower pamphlets pressed to their laps, faces serene as glass. In the hyperbolic earnestness of the children’s sidewalk games. In the audacity of a block party, the road sectioned off by cars, the streets cleared by repurposed no-parking signs someone had swiped from the last film crew to occupy the photogenic streets. It was there on Sunday mornings, the perfumed women in pretty dresses, somber men in dark suits holding Bibles like shields, hymns seeping from churches onto the sidewalk like fog. It was more than a collection of details, more than specific similarities. It was a feeling, a vibe, a rhythm you picked up in your bones. The underdog’s pride of a community always punching up. The qualities of home that he found in Bed-Stuy were mostly things he could not name; they were what he was afraid he would lose. He belonged to them by the randomness of birth, by the accident of biography.

  This formed an obligation. Sensei was right. It was why he had opposed Restoration Heights, why he lashed out at Franky and Buckley. But what were the limits of that commitment? Did it protect the names on the right side of his map, quarantine the blank spaces around them? Why was he afraid of implicating them—as though an entire community could be condemned by the actions of one or two of its members.

  He picked up his phone and called Harold.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, man, it’s Reddick.”

  “My brother. How you doing?” His tone was too warm, compensating for caution, perhaps. Voices rattled in the background.

  “Do you know a person named Jeannie?”

  “Nah, man. Jeannie? Let me think. Nah. Sorry.”

  “Gene, then? I’m not sure I heard it right.”

  “I know a Eugene. In um, uh, wait. Nah, you don’t know Eugene.”

  “Shit, let me think.”

  “I’m at the bar, young brother. So if you need to think maybe we can just pick this up at another time.”

  “I’m trying to ask you about someone that might be involved in that girl’s disappearance.”

  A pause. “I know that. I’m not stupid.”

  “Then you can’t help me?’

  “I told you, don’t ask me about that shit again. I told you that. And you’re calling me about that, here? Right now? You’re putting me at risk.”

  “What do you mean? Calling you about this where? Where are you?”

  “I’m down the street. I’m right in the thick of everything. I’m not saying shit.”

  He thought about the bars he had heard Harold mention. “Ti-Ti’s? Are you at Ti-Ti’s?”

  “Don’t come over here.”

  “Is someone there with you right now?”

  “I ain’t talking.”

  “I’ll be there in ten.”

  * * *

  He walked in beneath the glowing sign, Ti-Ti’s Executive Inn, the letters formed by looping tubes of trembling neon. Harold was alone. The bar was a warm pocket in the frozen afternoon, a narrow basement strung with Christmas lights. There was an old movie on the television, above the jukebox, competing with the Impressions for the attention of a disinterested room. The name alluded to the presidential streets that stepped like the rungs of a ladder south toward Crown Heights—Monroe, Madison, Jefferson—but the only president Reddick saw in the collage of old photos behind the bar was Barack Obama, his dignified and solemn face pasted among a tapestry of civil rights leaders and black intellectuals. Four people sat at the bar, including Harold, all of them black. Two men with their backs to the door and an older woman, lisping through false teeth at the bartender. Harold was on the last stool. Reddick took the empty seat beside him.

  “You’re not here. Or if you are here, you’re not expecting to talk to me about any of that nonsense.”

  “I’m a friend, having a beer.”

  “Yeah, alright.”

  The bartender, a short, cheerful white woman, smiled in his direction. He ordered a beer; after she delivered it she nodded at a sign behind the bar that read “cash only no tabs no exceptions.” He laid four crumpled ones on the bar.

  “Friends talk to each other about what’s on their mind,” Reddick said.

  “They consider the damage they could cause, too.”

  “What damage? What are you risking?”

  “I have been told, explicitly, not to speak with you about this shit. And I have also, explicitly, told you that I have been told this. What about this situation don’t you get?”

  “You said the girl. Don’t ask about the girl.”

  “People was pissed, man. Whoever this girl is, she had got into some shit.”

  “So don’t talk about her. I won’t ask about her.”

  “Th
ose other two cats, too. Ju’waun and um, um.”

  “Tyler.”

  “Ju’waun and Tyler. Don’t ask about that.”

  “Okay, fine. No Ju’waun. No Tyler.”

  “And no blonde. Explicitly, those words.”

  “Fine. No blonde.”

  “So now we can enjoy our beer.”

  “Gene. Jeannie. Who is this?”

  “Man, you don’t quit.”

  “That name isn’t on your list.”

  Harold looked over both shoulders, eyed the bartender and the other patrons, as though fearing espionage. “That name ain’t on my list because that name is the reason I have a list. You get me?”

  “Jeannie—that’s who your friend was so frightened of?”

  Harold shook his head and sighed. “You’re not talking about a person named Jeannie, man.”

  “Enough with the runaround.”

  Harold shook his head. “No, I mean it’s not Jeannie. It ain’t a name. You’re talking about the Genie.”

  “The Genie? What is that?”

  “It’s a who.”

  “Who the fuck is the Genie?”

  “The Genie is a procurer, man. You rub the lamp and the Genie appears and grants you a wish.”

  “I thought genies give you three wishes?”

  “This Genie grants you as many as you can pay for.”

  “Anything you want?”

  Harold shook his head. “The Genie is earthbound, brother. Ain’t no fucking magic.”

  “So what are we talking about? Drugs?”

  Harold nodded. “The Genie can get you drugs.”

  “So what? I know six different corners I can score on.”

  “Weed, sure. Blow. Molly. But what if you want pills, too? The kind you need a prescription for? Or even the kind you already got a prescription for, only you can’t afford to fill it? The Genie can handle all of that. One-stop shopping. But that’s not really everything.”