Restoration Heights

by Wil Medearis

  There was nothing in any of that he could verify, but it sounded right. Buckley, eager to please.

  “Do you have any further updates?” Thomas asked.

  He thought of his trip to FDP, of the revelation that Buckley and Franky were likely colluding, of the townhouse, of Ju’waun and Tyler and their allusions, their association with violence. He thought that there was no way Mrs. Leland didn’t know that Buckley was invested in Restoration Heights, and yet she hadn’t told him.

  “Not yet.”

  He hung up, pulled up the Oregon white pages. He turned the desk lamp on, put a coaster under his beer. He knew he should eat but couldn’t. There were thirty-five Grangers in Portland. In order to access their phone numbers he had to create an account, punch in his credit card. The site held a trove of personal data—email addresses, civil records—all with disclaimers about accuracy, proper use. He paid for a month’s access, the minimum. He dialed the first name on the list. The site said she was sixty-nine years old.

  “No, I don’t know any Hannah Granger. My sister’s name is Anne, but she never went by Anna. Annie, for a brief while, Annie Granger, but it didn’t take. What is this about?”

  He left messages when no one answered, claimed he was an employer trying to forward her last paycheck. Even with the time difference it was late to be calling, plus it was the weekend—he was met with suspicion but pressed until he was satisfied. No one knew any Hannahs, no one had a relative by that name.

  Did Dottie know she was lying, or was she repeating what her employers told her? How far had the cover-up spread?

  Finally he turned to the photos he had taken of Buckley’s documents. He plugged his phone into his laptop and uploaded the images. He sorted them by type first—check stubs, bank notices, letters sent or received. It all seemed banal, trivial—the sloughed skin of financial transactions. He had to try to understand them. Why keep a paper record, was it something particular about these documents or just a general practice? He searched names, memorized jargon, dug through online financial primers and Wikipedia. He realized he would never learn enough to be able to spot an irregularity, so he worked to reach a point where he could at least organize it, get some sense of what he was looking at. After a few hours he had gone as far as he could; he had found nothing to incriminate Buckley. He dropped the files onto a flash drive.

  He turned to the check stubs. He searched the name of each recipient. They were all personal names, no businesses. All men. Not every name led to a hit, but the ones that did were like Buckley: New York elite, philanthropy, the arts. The memos suggested loans, personal debts. One just listed “xmas bet,” dated in June—a ten-thousand-dollar inside joke. And then there was Franky Dutton. Buckley cut him a check three years ago, in August, for one hundred eighty-seven thousand dollars. The memo had a flat line drawn through it.

  Reddick leaned back in his chair. The number was a gut punch—four times what he earned for a year of handling art, with cash to spare, passed between the two men in a single transaction. It penetrated deeper than the blatant signs of the Sewards’ wealth—the villas, the massive townhouse, the battalion of household staff—precisely because, by the family’s terms, it was so small. It was a number that to Reddick looked like wealth, the payoff for his hard work, his mother’s sacrifices. For Buckley it was petty cash between friends, not even worth noting what it was for.

  Reddick closed his laptop, stood up and looked at the map. The six-pack was empty, he had progressed to whiskey, the dregs from Beth and Dean’s celebration. He hadn’t stopped to eat. He wrote in the day’s information. The Genie, Mia’s claims that Ju’waun and Tyler were with her that night. The pair’s association with what looked like a gang, and the messages that seemed to implicate them. The blocks of text made dark, organic shapes on the white page, like Rorschach blots. He focused on the negative spaces, the connective tissue. There was meaning in the contours, the outlines, a unity of shape and intent, facts that could be shimmied into being by proximity, by the tug of two-dimensional gravity. If he could just get the shapes right he could find her. It had been six days. His memory of her was decomposing. In its place he saw the photograph—she was becoming her image. You forget images more easily than you do people because the world is crowded with them—collections of light, data, information. There is more to a person than this. There was more to her. He reached for the person, tried to forget the photograph. He clung to that distinction; he wrote it on the case map: Find her, not the image of her, barely understanding what he meant. He lay on the bed and ran the memory on a loop, tried to fix every detail—the colors, the texture, like he was painting it, frame by frame. Tried to delay the claim of death, to see the rise and fall of her chest before he fell asleep.

  Fourteen

  He woke up hungover. His body ached—two days of drinking, of walking, still bruised from his chase through the development. He ate breakfast and sent a text to Derek, asking if he could help him with something.

  Derek sent back: You forget it’s Sunday?

  Five-on-five, full-court, every Sunday morning until the fitness classes started up at one—these were the games of record, the contests that all the two-on-twos and three-on-threes during the week were preparation for. They lasted around half an hour, teams gathering off court to cheer and wait their turn. Scores were kept, win-loss records noted, reputations carved gradually, knifed out by consistency and logged hours, by the aggregate trends of weekly peaks and valleys. On Sunday you made your name. Neither Derek nor Reddick had missed one in months.

  Let’s talk after, he replied. Then he sent a message to Clint, to see if he had found out anything about Franky. They agreed to meet before the games started.

  He arrived early and went to the weight room. It was nearly empty, a young couple spotting each other on the bench press, a pale man in glasses reading from a tattered paperback between sets. Two older women with thick Caribbean accents in baseball hats. No Clint. He walked back to the lobby, through the long hall past the cardio room, a forest of treadmills and ellipticals, of bobbing faces at war with tedium. Half a dozen white girls, most under thirty, heralds of change squeezed into lululemon or some other designer gym wear, like the Y was a New York Sports Club or an Equinox. A scattered few of the regular crowd as well, men and women, mostly older, mostly black. All of them, the new faces and the old, united in their dutiful resolve, in their common effort.

  In the lobby the sun was beaming, in defiance of the temperature, of the icy streets. The light knifed through his hangover cloud, bored into his eyes. Clint came in alone, his parka open to accommodate his barrel chest, his expression hidden behind aviator sunglasses.

  “You can’t even let me get settled?” he asked, indicating his gym bag and coat.

  “Take your time. I just didn’t want to miss you.”

  “You know what? It’s better we get this over with.” He nodded for Reddick to follow him. They went to the top of the stairs, where the hallway overlooked the lower level. It was quiet; patrons passed but didn’t linger. The cop set his bag on the floor.

  “Why are you asking about the Genie?” he said.

  “What? I asked you about Franky Dutton.” For a moment he worried that he had misspoken, somehow given Clint the wrong name. “I didn’t even know who the Genie was when I talked to you.”

  “You still don’t know. All you know is what you’ve been told which means you don’t know jack shit. Did I tell you what I do for a living?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I mean specifically. Have I told you what I do specifically for the police force? I have a memory of saying it but I want to clarify. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Drugs. You said drugs.”

  “Very good. Drugs. So don’t you think that if you start asking questions about the fucking Genie that it’s going to get back to me? Or did you think you could trust that drun
k Harold to keep his mouth shut?”

  Reddick’s world was shrinking. “Harold? You know Harold?”

  “Yeah, I know fucking Harold.”

  “From...through the neighborhood?”

  “Because all black people know each other.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I’m fucking with you. I know Harold because he’s a snitch, because he loves to talk and he’ll do it with anyone. See, Harold knows people that I actually do give a shit about, the kind of people that work for the Genie. Because that’s how my business works. It’s my job to know people that know people. And to make sure those people run their mouths.”

  “That’s what Harold does? Runs his mouth?”

  “Imagine my reaction last night when he unloads all of this on me, after I had already looked into that developer for you. I was riding high on it, my good deed for the week, and I think to check in on good old Harold—sitting right where you left him at Ti-Ti’s—and he starts in on how he’s scared for some naive white kid, and he shouldn’t have said anything but he wanted to help. I’m thinking—it’s impossible that you and Harold know each other, but there is no way in hell anyone else is asking about that same missing white girl so maybe it’s not so impossible. And sure enough.”

  “I swiped him into the subway a few times. Then we ran into each other and just started talking.”

  “So you swiped him in, huh?”

  “It’s not a big deal. I mean, I already have the MetroCard.”

  “You know why he asks, right?”

  “I never brought it up. Everybody faces hard times.”

  “You know he has a job, a house that was paid for when his mother passed?”

  “Yeah, he told me.”

  “So you could probably deduce that it isn’t a money thing?”

  “I mean...” Reddick shrugged, submitting to the cop’s momentum.

  “He thinks there are tracking devices in the cards.”

  “What?”

  “He thinks Giuliani and Bush did it. After 9/11 they teamed up, got all of the cities off of tokens and onto cards in order to track people. Especially black people. He says it wasn’t enough to round up the homeless into vans, to put street cameras on every block. They needed a way to monitor people’s movements.”

  He felt embarrassed for Harold. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you don’t know how little you know. Because you have been talking to a paranoid functioning alcoholic about a career criminal, and worse, you kept talking even after you saw how scared it made him. The Genie is not that dude in your dorm who sold you kush while he played Phish records, alright? She has her hand in more things than you could ever know. I don’t know what nonsense Harold tried to feed you about how she used to help people, but if that was ever true it’s in the dead past. She hasn’t cared about anything but her bottom line for a very, very long time. This is a world you want nothing to do with. It will grind your skinny ass to dust.”

  Three girls brushed past them, headed downstairs. Clint leaned over the rail, eyed their swaying hips.

  “I learned some things,” Reddick said. “It may have to do with the Genie, I don’t know.”

  “Did you not just hear me?”

  “I believe you. I don’t want anything to do with this, believe me. I was just trying to find these guys that went to that party with Hannah, and I stumbled into all of this. If I ask you, if I hear it from you, I don’t have to ask anyone else. I won’t have any reason to dig into the Genie’s business. If you really want to keep me safe just answer my questions.”

  Clint looked skeptical. “And what if you take what I say and go charging into even deeper shit?”

  “I’m not stupid. I’m just determined.”

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree about that.”

  “What is Sons of Cash Money?”

  “Harold tell you about that, too?”

  Reddick told him about his investigation, the tags, the crew names, the pseudonyms, the allusions to violence. Clint listened, stone-faced, and sighed when he finished.

  “You’re right about one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If I don’t tell you, then you’re going to get yourself killed trying to find out.” Clint removed his aviators and leaned against the rail. “These guys have no real connection to the Cash Money Brothers—somebody’s uncle ran a corner for them back in the day or something. This always happens, nobodies trying to leach some cred off the real hard-asses. Sons of Cash Money is one of a few crews that rose up in the empty space left by Cash Money Brothers’ takedown. Tyler is one of the older members. Spent eighteen months upstate. Pretty sure he was the shooter on a homicide in East New York a few months after he got out—this was maybe four years ago—but they couldn’t get him for it. He’s been quiet since—on my radar because he’s still in the game, but no guns, no assaults. Guys like that are usually doing a second bid by now, but he’s stayed out. He’s a good-looking kid—you saw him, right?—and smart, well spoken. Gets around the bar scene in the neighborhood, plays down his gangsta side, chases hipster girls.”

  “What about Ju’waun?”

  “Never heard of him. That doesn’t mean much, there’s a thousand of those guys we don’t know, and they don’t matter unless they connect to whatever larger case we’re building. But that split identity thing? That’s unusual. These kids are all in—that’s the only way they do it, because they have nothing else. And they don’t tolerate frauds. If I had to guess? I’d say maybe he didn’t come up in this shit, that he and Tyler met somewhere else and his friend is vouching for him while he plays at being a thug. Could be a cousin or something.”

  “They’re pretty open online about what they do.”

  “You should have seen it before we started popping some of them with their tweets.” Clint laughed. “We use social media to know who is with who, when, where. We build whole cases off of this shit.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They post photos of themselves flashing the stolen property, bragging about hits. It’s honor culture stuff—why do it if you aren’t going to advertise it, get a little status from it, make your rivals think twice.”

  “So the Genie—is she Sons of Cash Money?”

  “Fuck no. I told you that woman is the real deal. People like the Genie use gangs like SOCM to move some product for them, but that’s as far as it goes. The kids like the violence, the guns, the gangster posing—that’s their whole lives. It’s how they become somebody. But older heads like the Genie, they’ve been in the business for a while, they stay clear of that stuff. It gets in the way of making a profit.”

  Sensei came in, nodded at Clint and took a long look at Reddick before smiling and walking toward the back.

  “All that iron back there isn’t going to lift itself,” Clint said.

  “Sorry. We haven’t gotten to Franky yet.”

  “Before we leave this subject—you got any more questions about these guys, the Genie, any of this street shit—you ask me, okay? Not Harold or anybody else. And if you come across any hint that these people are involved with that missing girl, even a suspicion—I’ll let you talk to a detective, and they can follow up if it’s worth it.”

  “So you believe me, that she’s missing?”

  “If I really believed you I would already have called that detective.”

  “So what do you have on Franky?”

  “This will make your day.” He looked resigned, like it hurt to say it. “Drunk and disorderly. Possession. An assault charge.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Don’t gloat. Every one of the charges got dropped eventually. Amazing how hard it is to get things to stick to that white skin. It’s like you’re coated with something.”

  “What’s the assault?”

  “A wo
man in a bar. He tries to pick her up, she says no. She says he got angry and grabbed her wrist. Gave her a bracelet of bruises. He says he just caught her hand when she tried to slap him, that his opening line must have been a little too straightforward. As I mentioned, she eventually dropped the charges.”

  “So he gets violent when women say no.”

  “There’s more. I saw that his name was mentioned in connection with a gun case in Bushwick.”

  “He has a gun?”

  “Hold on, let me finish. Two officers respond to a call about some hophead with a gun, loitering in front of a building in Bushwick. When they get there the guy is sitting on his stoop, practically nodding off. He lives there. He has a piece tucked into the back of his waistband. Now they know right away something is wrong. The call was anonymous, the caller didn’t give any specifics, didn’t say how he knew the guy had a gun in the first place. The junkie was too fucked-up to flash it. And this isn’t the kind of guy they find guns on; this guy is just some addict. He’s like fifty. Getting guns off the street, this is priority number one for this squad, this is what they do, so they know how it goes down. They have instincts for this sort of thing. Of course once the guy sobers up he has no recollection of having it on him, he seems like he’s telling the truth, and they don’t feel right about busting him for it.”

  “What does this have to do with Franky?”

  “They ask around, turns out the building is being sold, the new owners want everyone out so they can gut it and turn it around, but there are holdouts, people that have been there long enough that they’re protected to some degree—they’ll be pushed out eventually but it will be a long process, and expensive.”

  “People usually just take buyouts.”

  “Some do, some don’t. Old-timers like this guy, no way. He gets his check, first and the fifteenth, blows it on dope, panhandles a little bit when he’s short. His dealer works out of the Chinese takeout up the street. He’s not relocating, that block is his entire world.”

  “So what are you saying?”