Restoration Heights

  “There’s a building,” she said. “That way, the gray brick? It has a back door. Also you can drop from the first-floor windows but it’s a bitch to get back in.”

  “I love this kind of shit. All the weird spaces that happened as the neighborhood grew. This is what developers are killing.”

  “As far as losses go, I’m not sure dirty inaccessible alleyways rank that highly. Come back in, goofy. I opened that to let the smoke out.”

  “Sorry.”

  She moved up to the arm of the couch and he sat on the cushion beside her. The blazing radiator overwhelmed the cold air pouring in from the window. She ran her fingers through his hair. “So you want to tell me about this long day, or keep it buried?”

  “Maybe buried.”

  “Did Beth reach out to you?”

  He reclined against her hip. “No. Why?”

  “She was pretty upset about your fight.”

  “Yeah? She wasn’t the only one.”

  “I heard. That’s part of what got her upset. I think you scared her.”

  “Scared her? That’s ridiculous.”

  “To you it’s ridiculous because you know you wouldn’t hurt her—on some level maybe she knows that, too, or believes it, but when a man is angry, it can be frightening. It’s like a little alarm goes off, reminding women of all the impolite truths we have to repress.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like if there was a fistfight we would almost always lose. And no matter how much progress we make, that imbalance won’t go away, which is bullshit and not fair, and being reminded of it makes you feel like whatever power you have managed to take for yourself is just flushed away.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do? Never be angry?”

  “Don’t ask me—I’m a cynic. I don’t think any of this stuff gets better. You just find a way to live with it. I’m only describing it to you for the sake of accuracy.”

  “Maybe I will have some of that,” he said. She passed him the bowl.

  “She’s not entirely wrong, either,” she said.

  “To be afraid of me?”

  “No, I mean about her argument.”

  He exhaled. “I know. It’s just that woke hipster shit, it’s irritating. They quote theory like scripture—or worse, tell you to go read it.”

  “The ‘it’s not my job to educate you’ line.”

  “Exactly. It’s so smug, when most of those kids went to all-white high schools. They read as a substitute for living. That’s all I was trying to say to her.” He passed the bowl back.

  “I get it. But most of those books have black authors. People like Beth and—your roommate—”

  “Dean.”

  “Beth and Dean can’t change how they were raised. But they can listen when they have the opportunity. That’s part of what those books are for, to expose people to a point of view they might not otherwise be able to get. Yeah, it can be annoying—a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds who just discovered systemic racism and now they won’t stop pointing it out everywhere they see it, like a toddler who just learned a new word—but their intentions are good.”

  “Sure, but when you don’t parrot all of it back at them, then they assume your intentions aren’t good. Like there’s no other way to be right.”

  “Maybe, but that’s just in-group out-group shit. That’s human nature, which I’ve already told you is something we just have to accept. Yeah, they’re smug, and insular, and in some ways remarkably closed-minded. But at least they’re trying.”

  A burst of cold air whipped across her lap, biting his whiskey fog away. He pressed his shoulder into her thigh, felt the give of her flesh. He sighed. “She wants me to stop this.”

  “She’s being your friend. She told me some of what you did—she’s afraid you’re going to get yourself arrested, or hurt.”

  “What about you? You’re helping me.”

  “I’m not afraid of the world,” she said. “That’s one of the perks of getting older—you realize just how little there is to be afraid of. How open it all is. I’m helping you because I think you can succeed, and even if your motives are messy it seems like a good thing, a worthwhile thing.” She brushed his face with her fingers. “It doesn’t hurt that I think you’re cute.”

  “I wish you’d tell Beth that.” She raised her eyebrows. “I mean that it’s worthwhile,” he said.

  “For what it’s worth, I did.”

  “I owe her an apology, I know that.” He stood up and faced her. Her knees pressed against the point of his hips.

  “She thinks you caught some of that white rage that’s going around.”

  “It’s not that. She just hit a sore spot. I hate that feeling that you’re being judged based on the category you belong to, because I feel like those categories are drawn so carelessly.”

  “Of course you do. White boy from a black neighborhood, like that makes you different.” She was smiling.

  “We’re all different.”

  “In a black girl’s apartment at three a.m. Working out whatever issues you got to work out.”

  She was teasing, playful, but there was a brittle edge. It was too late for this; they’d drunk too much, smoked too much, to be this nimble. They were skirting disaster.

  “It’s not like that,” he said.

  “There are—what...two...of us with studios in that building?”

  “Two what?”

  “Black girls.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “It’s a big building, with a lot of girls. All those other chicks, white, Asian, Hispanic, whose apartment you could be in right now.”

  “I’m flattered but you are seriously overestimating my appeal.”

  “New York is a tough market for ladies. The numbers are in your favor. But who do you go out for drinks with, what—the first week your roommate moves in? One of the two of us in the whole place. And who are you out partying with now? The same.”

  “It isn’t like that. I’m not here working out some issues, or trying to pretend to be something I’m not. I just liked you when we met. I enjoy your company. And tonight—I don’t know—didn’t you kiss me?”

  She looked at his face and sighed. “I guess I believe you.” She slid off the couch and went to the refrigerator. “I have exactly one beer. Split it?”

  “Sure.”

  She opened it and came back. “You know who else went to an all-white high school?” She pointed at her chest. “So you’d think I would have a radar for this sort of thing—white boys who only talk to me because of my black mother, for their bucket list or to make some half-assed political point. Proof of their purity, of how different they are from all the other white boys trying to do the same thing—like fucking a black chick gets them a pass for life. You’d think I would have developed an instinct for seeing that nonsense coming—but I never did. Instead I’m just paranoid about it.” She fixed him with an unreadable stare, her playfulness evaporated. “Mostly I try and stay away from you.”

  “Sarah. I’m here because of you, not because you’re black.”

  “That’s the thing. You can’t separate those two.”

  She sat down, took the beer from him, drank and gave it back. They sat in dumb silence for several minutes, then, “I waited tables in college.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going somewhere with this, okay? It was a couple shifts a week—spending money. It was a nice place, fine dining, on the water. Don’t forget I’m older than you are, this was—god, too long ago. I remember it as a naive time but it was probably just me that was naive. Anyway, black people don’t tip. That’s what we believed—me, too. I mean, I believed it. I had evidence, we all did—we had data on our side. Shifts upon shifts of fieldwork—and this place wasn’t small, maybe a hundred covers a night, a pretty good sample size. The rest of the sta
ff was white. We were all friends, went out after work, that sort of thing—and we talked about who tipped well and who didn’t, you know, me included. The hostess tells you that you’ve been sat and you look in your section and there’s a black couple there, and you think, great. Here comes ten percent. And because waiting tables is a really shitty job—I mean just hard on your soul—have you ever done it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, it wears on you, and because it does you develop a bitter humor, to tolerate it. You and the rest of the staff, trying to outdo each other to see who can be more caustic, more jaded. I don’t know, maybe it’s not like that anymore. So one night I’ve got a four-top, black businessmen. Really nice suits. You wouldn’t know this, but men in suits? That’s who you want. Not couples, not families. Just a table full of rich men, that’s your best bet to get the most money per table—which is all you’re trying to do. You absolutely cannot think about the politics of it. You only get so many tables a night so you have to squeeze as much money from each one as possible. So four men in suits—great—but four black men? That’s a crapshoot. It’s like, which stereotype will carry the day? I say ‘stereotype’ but remember—this is what we actually see. This is based on lived experience, so maybe it’s more like which trend, which tendency. Anyway these brothers are ordering expensive wine, appetizers, medium-rare steaks. And they love that I’m waiting on them. It’s all sista, can you please, and sista, thank you, and I have this feeling like we’re in it together—like we’ve made it together. Like we are together in our blackness but still excelling in a white world, like we’ve gotten everything without giving anything up. They’re asking me about school, telling me how they can’t wait to see my paintings in New York, all of that. Sista, can I have the check.”

  “Sarah, you don’t—”

  “I do, though. And you have to listen. Twenty dollars on a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar total. It takes me a minute to process the numbers. I have to go back to the computer and close out the tab. I have to enter that tip amount, see it on the screen in front me, and I’m so humiliated that I’m fighting back tears, and this other waiter, she’s standing behind me, and she sees the amount on the screen, sees the table number, and kind of snorts, and says, Saw that coming. Then she walks away. This girl was my friend.”

  She took the beer and didn’t return it.

  “In her mind she didn’t do anything wrong—this was something we had probably joked about before, ‘Oh I love my brothers and sisters but I wish they would tip, ha ha ha,’ but the joke was always on me. I just never realized it until that moment. Because to everyone else who worked in the restaurant, that’s me at that table. A white person stiffs you because of some character flaw, because they are cheap, or selfish—but when a black person stiffs you the only flaw is their blackness. They’re stiffing you on behalf of their entire race. So at the same time that I’m receiving the shitty tip I’m also giving it, at the same time that I’m enforcing these bullshit norms about how much more money you’re supposed to pay on top of what the actual bill already says—some arbitrary figure that who knows what white person came up with anyway—at the same time that I’m enforcing this norm I’m violating it. I’m implicated on both sides. I’m selling out and not getting paid for it. Because I wanted to make some beer money.”

  “Sarah, I’m so sorry.”

  “I didn’t tell you that story because I wanted sympathy.” She got up and disappeared into her bedroom. When she came back she was holding a sheet and a pillow. Her eyes were damp. “I told you so that you know what I’m talking about when I say there’s no separating the two. So that you know what it costs me to say that there’s nothing to do but live with it.”

  She handed him the pillow and sheet. “It’s very, very late. Get some sleep.”

  Seventeen

  He woke up first, after dreaming of water. A basketball court on a ship, skyscraper waves that never washed him away. His shots missed the rim, the backboard, by feet.

  In his sleep he had heard someone—the roommate, home after all—swear, rummage through the kitchen and leave. Sometime after that he got up, poured himself a glass of water and peeked down the hall. Sarah’s door was closed, her lights off. He sat down with his phone and placed a pillow over his hard-on. He had slept in his boxers but had only hazy memories of getting undressed. It was after eleven.

  The calls he was waiting on—Derek, Lane—hadn’t come in yet. Needing to kill time, he wondered if he should reach out to Thomas, ask him why Mrs. Leland hadn’t brought up Buckley’s investment in Restoration Heights. There was an off chance she hadn’t recognized the neighborhood when they spoke the first time—though she seemed too canny for that—but Reddick had referred to the project by name to Thomas, and the house manager hadn’t said a word. Maybe she had asked him to stay quiet about it—but why? The omission thickened the wall around her motives. There was something he couldn’t see, something that informed her contradictory behavior—why she hired Reddick but gave him so little help. It was time to find out what it was. He had been too indulgent of her secrets.

  He picked up his phone and opened a search window, typed in the family’s name, saw the same results as the first time he tried this—a solid page about her son before any discussion of the family as a whole. He had already skimmed the pages about Anthony Leland—now he dug deeper. A Rockefeller Republican, the state senator was halfway through his second term; the Times said he was a shoo-in for a third. He dressed like an extension of his mother’s house—stately, immune to trends. He had no bad press. There were photos of him shaking hands with President Bush, of his wife and the current First Lady in a Bronx elementary school. His online presence was as tailored and pressed as his suits.

  Reddick heard a door shut down the hall. The shower came on. He adjusted the pillow. He should have gotten dressed but he wasn’t sure where his clothes were.

  He added Restoration Heights to the search field, saw that Anthony Leland was a vocal supporter of the project. The position made political sense—Restoration Heights had the mayor’s endorsement, the backing of the state senator’s campaign donors. There he was at a dinner three years ago, with the head of Corren Capital, after the development was announced. He was seated beside Buckley. There they were again, much later, Buckley and Anthony Leland on a porch in the Hamptons. The image embedded in a Tumblr page, a series of posts focused on exposing the money behind Restoration Heights—insinuations of collusion, images of the mayor with the principals of Corren, of various investors with various landlords. It was nothing new, in theme or content—allegations without proof. There were six shots of Buckley, and Anthony Leland was in five of them—a variety of places, in the city and out. He searched their names together, found a short post on a lifestyle blog about their friendship, how Anthony was taking Buckley under his wing, possibly grooming him for politics.

  Reddick struggled to make this fit. Mrs. Leland had claimed to know the Sewards well—he had imagined galas, foundation boards, charity dinners, anything but some partnership between Buckley and her son. The relationship opened up new possibilities, evoked the threat of conspiracy.

  He flashed a text to Thomas, told him he needed to talk. He tapped his fingers on his bare knee, stared out the window at the shabby brick of the neighboring building. He wished he had his map.

  “You hungry?”

  He jumped—he hadn’t heard Sarah coming. “I could eat the world.”

  He turned around. She wore sweatpants that hung low on her rangy hips, a tank top with straps thin as twine. Her hair was dry, and bobbed in caramel rings around her face. Her swollen eyes were lined with dark from their late night, her lips pale but full. Her freckles were a celebration—a dash across the bridge of her nose and a cascade down her bare shoulders.

  “What are you looking at?” She sat down and he slid over, the pillow pressed into his lap.

  “I’m wondering how I
managed to bungle last night so badly.”

  “Oh yeah?” He saw relief on her face, a glimpse that her confidence was as contingent as his; an improvisation. It surprised him.

  “And trying to figure out how I might hit the reset button.”

  “Life doesn’t have resets.”

  “So it would be a terrible thing to try and pick up where we left off?”

  “It wouldn’t be terrible. But I’ve got a better idea.” She reached beneath the couch, pulled his jeans out by the belt loop. “Put these on and cook some breakfast with me. Then, later this week, come see me at my studio and we can talk about art, have a drink and see where it goes.”

  He wasn’t sure whether to feel let down or not. He leaned forward and kissed her. Her body went soft—her resolve wavering. While their eyes were shut he took his pants from her hand. “Deal,” he said when they separated.

  He got dressed, freshened up in her bathroom. When he came out she was in the kitchen, laying out dishes and ingredients.

  “Thanks again for calling,” he said.

  “This wasn’t why I called.”

  “Ha ha. I mean about Marie, about this case.” He joined her and they started cracking eggs, chopping vegetables. “I need all the help I can get.”

  “What a scumbag Franky is. I knew he wasn’t a nice guy at Penn. But I assumed he had mostly grown out of it. I mean, everyone is some kind of asshole in their twenties—but he’s just gotten worse.”

  He told her about Franky’s arrest record, and planting the gun to force tenants out. “I think he killed her. I really do.”

  “That is too awful to think about. A murderer? It’s not like I was close to the guy, but I could never have imagined.”

  Reddick’s phone began to vibrate. He flipped it over, saw Thomas’s name, then eyed the half-prepared food strewn across Sarah’s counter. He sent it to voice mail.

  He grabbed a tomato. “How small do you like these? Diced?”

  “That wasn’t important?”