Restoration Heights

by Wil Medearis

  “Turns out there have been a bunch of calls on the tenants in this building. All anonymous. Various minor crimes, possession, whatever. All of them happening after the building was sold.”

  “To Franky’s company, FDP.”

  “Took you long enough. Framing the tenants to get them out. Franky is questioned, did you or any of your employees plant the gun, did you or any of your employees make the phone calls. Of course nothing came of it. I tracked down the officers that chatted with him and they said they would have loved to wipe the smirk off his face but they had no evidence. They knew, he knew they knew, but it just wasn’t the kind of case anyone was interested in building. ADA would rather go after someone more dangerous, Feds would rather go after someone with more clout.”

  “Fuck.”

  “And again, no evidence. So this guy is a real asshole after all. Feel vindicated?”

  Reddick was silent for half a minute, absorbing it. “Hannah could have said no. I had been thinking jealousy, collusion. But maybe it was just Franky. He can’t handle not getting his way.”

  “There’s a long road between entitlement and murder. And you have to pave it with proof.”

  Reddick shook his head. “That can’t be it anyway—there’s too much it leaves unexplained. Like why Buckley is refusing to cooperate.”

  “What about this girl’s family?” Clint asked. “Her friends?”

  “I don’t know any friends. She only had one social media account and it’s private. It’s like she barely existed. The Sewards are claiming she went home to her family but no one with her last name in her hometown claimed her.”

  “Maybe they’re unlisted.”

  “I guess. But the timing, the matter-of-fact way the Sewards’ house manager told me about it—it’s too convenient. It’s damage control, trying to get me to leave it alone.”

  “This girl has to know other people. Her fiancé’s family can’t hide it from them forever.”

  “I’d love to talk to a family member, talk to a friend, just to find out what lie the Sewards are feeding them.”

  Clint leaned forward. “That’s not what you need to know. It doesn’t matter what the lie is. What matters is why they are lying. What do they have to gain by delaying the inevitable?”

  “You seem almost interested.”

  “Don’t get cocky. I’m just making conversation.”

  “We’ll see.” A child raced by, giggling, her haggard mother yelling for her to be careful on the stairs. “Maybe that’s how Restoration Heights fits in. The delay. Buckley has a chunk of money tied up in the project, I don’t know, maybe there is some deadline or something. A milestone to reach, after which a scandal would be less damaging.”

  “Do I want to know how you found that out?”

  “Derek told me.”

  Clint laughed. “You con the whole damn YMCA into helping you?”

  “I guess people like me.”

  Two men came up the stairs. Reddick recognized one of the faces but didn’t immediately place it—young, pocked skin, sharp braids. He caught Reddick’s gaze.

  “Oh shit, it’s Skinny Tom Hardy,” he said, laughing. “You here to ball, Skinny Tom?”

  Reddick kept his face flat, affected an arrogant calm. “I’ll be up there.”

  “You owe me. Alright? You owe me.” He and his friend walked toward the rear stairwell that led up to the courts.

  “Who was that?”

  Reddick winced. The sound of the guy’s voice had reinvigorated his hangover. “He got hot because I dunked on him. It happens.”

  If Clint was impressed or surprised he didn’t show it. “You don’t look shit like Tom Hardy. You know that, right?”

  “Don’t we all look alike?”

  “Oh, you got jokes now?”

  Reddick shrugged and Clint shook his head, as though this final provocation had exhausted his patience.

  “Tom Hardy,” he muttered. “That’s an insult to a fine actor. Did that guy even look at your face?”

  “It’s not that far off.”

  “See, that’s the problem with people. They don’t really look at each other. They just see some approximation that more-or-less conforms to whatever vague ideas they already have in their head. For us, for cops? We have to learn to nix that shit real fast. All the details that the approximation leaves out are the details that will break your case. You really want my help? This is the best thing I can do for you, is tell you this: see things for how they are, and not for how you think they are.”

  Reddick offered his hand, Clint took it. “Thanks. I’ll try.”

  “And stay the fuck away from the Genie.”

  * * *

  He was the last guy to walk in. The other players had drifted into teams, arcing warm-up shots beneath opposing baskets. Braids was on the opposite end from Derek. Reddick joined his friend and managed a few layups to loosen up before the game started.

  See things for how they are, and not for how you think they are. He thought he had been building this case objectively, using facts like stones, setting one on top of another. But it was still his decisions, his hunches, that determined which stones he used—and he couldn’t cleanse that process of his biases.

  On the first possession he came off a pick with a long look at an open jumper—not his shot but it was there, waiting; he had to take it. It hit the inside of the rim, caromed and spilled out.

  Of course he went after the guy he was hardwired to hate—a stereotype of an irresponsible developer. Franky was an entitled bully, Buckley one of his crony enablers, twin incarnations of indifferent affluence. You can’t help but resent guys like that, unless you’re one of them. They invoke all your petty, bitter envies.

  He went three straight possessions without touching the ball. After the next rebound he clapped his hands in the backcourt, received a pass, beat his man off the line but another defender closed hard and he had to kick it out, restart the play. Derek chided him for not waiting for a screen.

  But the image he hung on them was accurate. He knew that Franky mistreated women—that wasn’t projection. And now he knew that he pushed people out of his properties, displaced lives without regard to how his decision affected anything other than his own profit. Those were facts, not stereotypes. He didn’t suspect Franky because he was entitled—he suspected him because he was cruel and unscrupulous.

  Braids switched off his man to Reddick.

  “Your eyes are all red, Skinny Tom. This game just started and you already look like you want to cry.”

  Reddick went right at him, hard—which was what Braids wanted, but he underestimated Reddick’s first step and caught an elbow to his gut as the art handler darted by. Another defender crashed the paint and Reddick dropped an easy floater over the top.

  “There you go,” a teammate yelled.

  When they lined back up Braids was smiling.

  Applying the same question to Ju’waun and Tyler—how true was the image he had pieced together of the two of them? Dean was of course right—there was an abiding pressure to view all young black men as criminals. But he and the rest of Reddick’s Bushwick friends absolved themselves by pushing the source of the idea elsewhere—Hollywood, the media, flyover states—yet would stare at their own feet if they passed Ju’waun and Tyler on the sidewalk at night, hearts racing, minds firing excuses. They would sooner be skinned than admit to it. Of the crowd Reddick grew up with, in his old neighborhood, two of them never graduated high school. They were both black. They were both in prison. There were consequences to the uneven toll of the war on drugs, to the wreckage that mass incarceration laid on certain communities while passing others by, and if you couldn’t admit that it created a criminal class out of undereducated black youths you couldn’t begin to fix it. Pretending the problem wasn’t there, that it was all media bias and stigma, helped no one. Reddick saw
Ju’waun and Tyler as reminders of his own near-misses, of his undeserved luck—there but for the grace of god, for the grace of my white skin. Dragging them into the murder of a white girl felt like harassing victims of a virus he was born immune to.

  ay she got caught slippin.

  The other team missed a pull-up jumper off the break, Derek and Reddick were still at half-court but their man was there for the rebound—he fired the ball out to Derek. Reddick was already two steps past the defense and Derek’s pass was quarterback-precise; Reddick laid it up uncontested. He didn’t look but knew from the awkward way it left his fingers, from his teammates’ reactions, that it rolled out.

  “You alright?” Derek asked.

  Reddick waved him off.

  The next time Braids touched the ball he drained a three over Reddick’s raised hand.

  There were only so many ways the pieces fit together; perhaps only one way. It was about the points of contact. Franky was connected to Buckley by their history. Buckley was invested in Restoration Heights, which was in the Genie’s territory—where Franky also had a property. Considering his illicit history Franky might have tapped one of the Genie’s services in the past—maybe she sold him the gun he planted on that poor hophead. She arranged things. Harold had said no murder, but the fear her name invoked suggested he was underselling her capacity for violence.

  Reddick was pressing. He saw a teammate backpedaling to the three-point line, away from his defender, knew he should kick it out but couldn’t, not with Braids daring him to come forward. He shot and missed, again. His open teammate shook his head, admonished him. They were down four points.

  So: Franky hires the Genie to kill Hannah. She sends Ju’waun and Tyler to do the job. Either by themselves or to lure her to someone else—the honey in the flytrap. It’s Ju’waun that Hannah latches onto, and he’s happy about it, he’s eager to prove that he’s hard, that he deserves to be in the crew. Mia, the clerk from Cask, is their alibi, the black eye her encouragement. And why? Because Hannah had finally said no—cut Franky off, decided to be a faithful wife even if she hadn’t been a faithful girlfriend. Buckley had blown up at the gala, forced her to decide, and she chose her future husband. So Franky reacts like he had with the girl in the bar—violent rage. He does it near Restoration Heights on purpose, perhaps to hide the body there, perhaps just to link her to it, because Buckley is too gutless to follow her trail if it leads there, too afraid of jeopardizing his investment. Franky counts on Buckley’s infatuation with him to keep him in line. Their meeting after Reddick’s visit to FDP was more damage control, Franky checking in to make sure Buckley’s suspicions were still hemmed in by avarice and fear.

  The thing was, Braids could shoot. A mouth is a jab; it works fine alone but it’s better when it prods your opponent into eating a right hook, when you can capitalize on the reactions it provokes. Reddick was tired of being stuck by it—he wanted to make a play, to shut him up. He bit so hard on a crossover that he fell to one knee and Braids buried a silky jumper over his exposed back. The spectators moaned, one of them whistled.

  “I still owe you, Tom. That ain’t it. That ain’t even close to it.”

  The narrative flouted Clint’s warning about generalities. All the actors were in their most obvious roles. Vindictive, scheming, rich white men. Black killers, thugs for hire. A young, pretty, white female victim. It was a collection of biases, of preconceptions, of the worst stereotypes—some he shared and some he abhorred—but he had built all this on facts, observations. It fit the events. The truth does not care about your sensibilities.

  He saw a gap, planted his foot, rubbed Braids off his hip with an off-ball screen, raised his hand and caught a crisp bounce pass. But he took the wrong angle off the pick, was too eager and cut too sharply toward the hoop, which put him right back into Braids’s face—only he decided it didn’t matter, it was time to end this, put it right down his fucking throat. You know you can outjump that son of a bitch, just do it, up, up, up, up.

  Braids slapped the ball with his open palm, firing it into the pads behind the basket.

  The groans of both teams exploded in the cavernous gym. Braids caught his hand, too, maybe before the ball, maybe after, and followed through like he was winging a baseball. The motion spun Reddick in the air, he flailed to get a foot beneath him, came down on the outside edge of his toes—not nearly enough to stay up. He spilled onto the hardwood like a stack of plates. The ball bounced past his face. When he opened his eyes Braids was standing over him.

  “We even now.”

  “Foul!” Derek yelled. “That’s a fucking foul, man!”

  “Come on.” The other team protested.

  “He threw him onto the fucking ground.”

  “I ain’t throw that man. He fell.”

  “I fucking saw you, asshole.”

  “Derek, brother. Calm down, man,” his teammates trying to settle him. “Calm down.”

  “I watched you.”

  “Yo, Skinny Tom, tell your boy I ain’t push you, man.”

  Reddick got up, slowly, hurting. “Let’s just keep going.”

  “You don’t have to do this, bro.” Derek said. “He fucking shoved you.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Did I shove you or not?”

  “I said it’s fucking fine.”

  Braids sneered. “That ain’t no answer.”

  “Who the fuck are you anyway?” Derek got in his face. “We’re here like every Sunday and I’ve never seen you.”

  “Here every Sunday, like I’m supposed to be impressed. Y’all niggas strut like you at the Gersh when you at the damn YMCA.”

  “If we aren’t shit how come you can’t even cover my boy without fouling?”

  Braids rolled his eyes. “Defend him all you want, you still gonna wake up black as me tomorrow morning.”

  “What did you say to me? What did you just say?”

  “Listen to how you talk, bro.”

  “Everybody just calm the fuck down.” One of the regulars edged between them. “Derek, your man already said it’s okay. And you,” turning to Braids, “you got to learn when enough is enough. Alright?”

  Braids grinned.

  To Derek. “Alright?”

  Derek sucked his teeth, shrugged.

  “Now, can we finish this game?”

  They limped through the final point, both teams playing loose D, mostly silent, relieved when the final shot went in. Reddick’s team lost. They lined up to shake hands, except for Braids and Derek. A few of them patted Reddick on the shoulder in gestures of consolation. On his way out Braids slapped the threshold, a firecracker pop in the quiet gymnasium. He went down the stairs three at a time. A few of the older guys shook their heads.

  “You sure you’re alright?” Derek asked when they were alone.

  “Thanks for having my back.”

  “That dude is an asshole.”

  “It was my own fault.”

  “He suckered you into playing his game. It happens.” Derek squirmed into his hoodie. He seemed calmer now, Braids’s insults forgotten. “So what did you want my help with?”

  Reddick told him about breaking into Buckley’s desk, and taking photos of the financial documents.

  “What about the guys she was with that night?”

  “I’m getting somewhere with them, too. I think I have an idea for how it all fits together.”

  “You come up with this idea just now?” He nodded at the court. “Out there?”

  Reddick winced, the memory still sore. “Some of it, yeah.”

  “Don’t ever try to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

  “The thing is, I need to figure out some of this financial stuff first. Maybe it’s worthless but I want to check all the boxes.” He pulled the flash drive from his pocket, thankfully undamaged from his fall. “I put all
the photos I took on here. Do you think you could take a look for me? Just glance over them to make sure there isn’t some obvious fraud or something?”

  Derek hesitated. “Yeah. Okay. I doubt you have anything. I’ll deny ever having looked if anyone asks me.”

  “I’d never mention you. I really appreciate this.”

  “You’re either in over your head, or you’re entirely inside your head. I’ll let you know when I figure out which.”

  Fifteen

  He walked home on thawing sidewalks, along the edge of Restoration Heights. Melting ice collected in filthy estuaries along the curb. He stopped to look through one of the windows in the plywood barrier—the site was still blanketed in white. Whatever secrets it covered were safe.

  Perhaps Buckley was blameless, a victim of his own weakness, but it didn’t taste right. He had the resources of his entire family behind him; he could shield himself from suspicion and still make an effort to find out what happened.

  So how did Restoration Heights fit? Reddick’s eyes drifted along the fence, past the warnings and endorsements, past the promises of sustainability, to the list of investors, Corren Capital at the top. Who were the others? He walked closer to the list. There were at least twenty names, mostly corporate—in it for the money but also for this, for the chance to stamp their name on a project that would shape the neighborhood, that ten years from now might define it. Ambition of this scale was never merely about profit—it was about legacy, reputation. He thought of Sons of Cash Money and its members’ online swagger—this was no different; why do it unless everyone knows that you’ve done it, unless it could serve as warning and boast. There was only one game, played in different arenas. He didn’t recognize any of the names. He took a photo of the list.

  Arcs of pain pulsed his hip—Braids had dumped him on the bruise he took chasing that kid in Restoration Heights. He was grateful that Derek stepped in. There had been a moment of doubt that anyone was on his side—his old fear that the skills that had opened friendships also bred resentment. Derek’s help meant more to Reddick than he had expected.