Restoration Heights

by Wil Medearis

  That drawing of Sensei was pretty wonky. He removed it. He shifted another page to fill the gap but now the left side was off. Alright, fine, just tweak a few things—what else did he have to do with his time. He went to unpin another one but realized it wasn’t so much the arrangement. It was the drawings themselves that weren’t quite right. They lacked backbone. He had aimed for a kind of carefree invocation of mood—instead they seemed frivolous. The few areas that he had knuckled into looked overworked, verging on academic. He went to Hannah, the nexus. Okay, she was still fine. The composition was nice. But her face was kind of fucked-up. How had he not noticed? There was a weird mark that he had intended as cheekbone but instead looked like some piece of misplaced ear. He could make it read as cheek if he squinted, but only if he worked at it. The cigarette had left a lump of ash in his gut that the coffee was propelling to his limbs, his head. He picked up the sketched plans for the constructions. There was something fresh about them—a gestural inquisitiveness that called back to the map—but they couldn’t stand on their own, not really. Perhaps they would be fine concepts to plan structures from but he didn’t have the skills to refine them into workable blueprints, much less to build them.

  He stepped back from the work, to view all of it together. He felt hollow. The room wasn’t bad—simply lackluster. Nothing looked as good as it had felt to make. The discrepancy gutted him—that such thrilling activity could produce these middling results. He was hot with shame. How had he ever thought he could he bet his life on this?

  He gathered the loose drawings into a stack, left the map in disarray and went into the living room. Maybe this was an opportunity, but it didn’t matter if he hadn’t put in the time to be ready—or worse, flat didn’t have the talent. He couldn’t remember when he had traded painting for basketball. There had been no conscious decision—it was an emergent choice, an ever-expanding sequence of tiny failures of will. He couldn’t reverse it on a whim, on a mercantile impulse. Some decisions you can’t come back from. Perhaps the world accepts such opportunism but the work flatly rejects it. Inauthenticity was smeared on every drawing in that room, page after page calling him a liar. The work will tell you, even if no one else will.

  Fuck art, fuck Hannah and—why not—fuck the money. He had to find a job—worse, he had to find a career. Past thirty and listless, he had made only one bet but hedged it to irrelevance. Actually, don’t fuck the money—maybe take it to use for something else, leave art alone—he wondered if he could bargain Mrs. Leland for enough to make a down payment on an apartment in the neighborhood. Root himself here. Derek could help with the financing, the searching. The idea echoed in the space left by that morning’s enthusiasm—he needed something there, to fill it. Even if it was something he didn’t really believe in.

  It would be terrifically stupid not to take the money.

  He grabbed his ball and went to the courts up the street. The ice was gone. Puddles guarded the paint like stone-footed defenders. After several minutes two kids wandered over and the three of them improvised a wordless, scoreless game of Horse. It started tentatively but they raised the stakes with a succession of increasingly elaborate shots, until they were all tossing no-looks and spins, Euro steps to off-handed hooks, half showing off and half just testing the limits of dumb luck. All three of them giggling; Reddick’s threadbare joy spun delicately over his anguish. The kids were genuinely good but so young that it was impossible to say if their talent might come to anything. There was too much time for their bodies to betray them, to pick some height under six-three and stop there, no matter how much they ate or prayed. Time for their proportions to go awry, legs too short, hands too small, time to become slower, clumsier. What would Reddick have done if he were two inches taller—those Division II schools might have asked him to come in and score, play his natural position, rather than offering to make him the token try-hard, a smart system guy who set picks and played effort defense. Two inches taller and a little faster, a little more explosive—one more dollop of genetic luck might have gotten him there, possibly even into Division I, into televised games. Never mind that that would have been years gone by now—he would at least have those memories to sustain him.

  The kids left. He went home. He ate and showered without looking at the remains of his map, then, when he was ready, braced himself and went into his bedroom. He sat down on the edge of his bed and stared—some part of him had hoped for a rebound, for it to look better with fresh expectations. Instead he felt embarrassed by the disarray, the days of careful work obliterated by a few hours of frantic activity. He was ashamed that the money had exposed him so thoroughly—that what he thought was moral courage had instead been self-deception, a commitment to ignoring his own colossal failure. He stood up and went into the other room.

  Twenty

  He slept for ten hours after his first sober night in a week. The temperature had fallen again; the morning was cold and white as a corpse. He made coffee and breakfast and wondered where Dean was.

  He hadn’t decided whether he would take the money but he would need a job regardless. He opened his laptop, killed tabs and windows that he had been keeping alive, zombie-like, to mark his trail through the case. He dug up his résumé, swallowed horror at seeing his life condensed to a single page, at having to own up to his passion for useless pursuits. He sifted through listings. An artist in Hoboken needed someone to clean and type, a moving service needed a back and a pair of strong hands. Which part of his body could he lease. He was at it a few hours when his phone rang.

  It was Derek.

  “See?” Reddick said. “Sometimes a text just won’t do.”

  “Enjoy your triumph. Honestly, I expected you to push me to voice mail. You’re not back at work yet?”

  “Yeah. About that.” He told him about being fired, and his theory of Mrs. Leland’s motives, and her offer.

  “That sounds less like an offer and more like a threat.”

  “She said she had other ways of preventing me from talking, that this was the only way I could benefit in the process.”

  “I told you from the beginning—you were in over your head dealing with people like her.”

  “I wasn’t expecting her to push back so hard.”

  “To me it seems like overkill—I can’t see what she is so worried about that she would react that strongly. But take her at her word. She’s considered how much her time is worth and decided that it’s cheaper for her if you take the offer.”

  “So, what? That’s it?”

  “You could try and push for more money. See how much it actually means to her.”

  “You know I care about this.”

  “But you’re thinking real hard about taking the cash.”

  “It’s the kind of choice that seems clear until you actually have to make it. It isn’t just that you have to weigh the money against your beliefs—it’s that the money makes you mistrust the scale.”

  “That’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a lot of money for you.”

  “For you.”

  “Come on. You have to be real about where you are.”

  “Yeah. I’m not so great at that.”

  “Your problem is that you’re a better doer than you are a thinker.”

  “I’m so glad you called. Really.”

  “It’s nothing against you, man. Most people are, at least when they’re young. The ratio flips when you get older but by then it’s too late—you’re already locked down by decisions you made when you were still lousy at making decisions. I was lucky. I had my mom to show me what good decisions, what thinking strategically, could do. I watched her scrape poverty off like old skin, and more importantly, I saw how she did it. She picked a spot and mapped out a path toward it. Good luck and hard work don’t mean jack shit if you don’t have your goals locked down tight.”

  “So you’re saying take the money?”

  “
I’m saying you have to figure out what you want. I mean long-term, not just in this moment. Pick where you want to be in fifty years and lay every choice you make against that.”

  “That sounds great. But I don’t have that kind of focus in me.”

  “It’s not too late to learn.”

  “You take classes in this? Strategic thinking?”

  “What do I keep saying to you, bro? UM is a good fucking school.”

  Reddick paused, then, “I’ve got a week.”

  “So use it. But listen—you want to know why I called or are you done with this?”

  “The case?”

  “I finally went through all the files you gave me.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t see anything. It was all straightforward accounting stuff. A paper trail that doesn’t go anywhere interesting.”

  Reddick walked to the window, watched shivering pedestrians hurry beneath the spider-web branches of leafless trees. “Nice to know I got myself fired for nothing.”

  “Sorry, man. You might like this, though—I also looked into Franky’s Restoration Heights sale.”

  “And?”

  “And he only created Tompkins Mac a week before the sale went through. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything—creating a LLC is pretty common for new landlords. It’s what any advisor would recommend.”

  “But he isn’t a new landlord.”

  “No, but even so, if he wanted to keep these assets separate, either from his personal assets or his company’s, this is how he would go about it. Trust me when I say it’s not suspicious on its own.”

  “On its own.”

  “Oh yeah. Because three days after the sale there is an assistant VP of Corren Capital onstage with the mayor announcing Restoration Heights—the first time the project became public.”

  Reddick paced back into his kitchen, his enthusiasm reigniting despite himself. “He knew it was coming. He bought those three properties knowing that he could flip them right back to Corren.”

  “For almost double what he paid.”

  “Buckley obviously told him it was about to happen. Isn’t that insider trading?’

  “Insider trading is only for securities, not real estate. There are disclosure laws, that sort of thing, and if there were any irregularities there could potentially be a lawsuit. But you would need a lot more than just good timing to make a case. Acting on information that only you have access to is pretty common with real estate—it’s usually difficult to show that anything illegal actually happened.”

  “Wealthy people helping other wealthy people get wealthier.”

  “Right. Nothing to see here. Except.”

  “Except what?”

  “Except that Tompkins Mac leveraged ninety-five percent of the deal.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means Franky used a bank loan to cover almost the entire cost.”

  “Wait—that’s a thing?”

  “It’s very, very rare—but not unheard of. Leveraging is a way to manage risk. Think about it like this: I want to make a bet. If I use all of my money, and the bet loses, all of my money is gone—I can’t make any more bets.”

  “Or eat. Or pay your rent.”

  “Ha ha, assume that this money is separate okay? This is just what you have earmarked for investment.”

  Reddick thought of his checking account, scraped nearly to the bone on the first of every month. “Okay, right,” he said.

  “Now, if I get you to loan me half of it, and the bet loses, I still have half of my money. I have to pay you back but at least I can still make more bets—I’m still in the game. I’m not risking as much.”

  “Why would I let you bet with my money?”

  “Because I’ll pay you for it. That’s what interest is. I pay you for the right to use some of your money instead of my own. Now for you to give me that loan, you have to be pretty sure that I can make those payments, on time, and when the term is up either repay the loan or refinance. Follow? Good. In the case of real estate, that means you need to be sure that the property that I want to buy—the bet—is going to generate enough revenue, through some combination of rents and resale value, for me to service that debt and ultimately repay the loan. I’m simplifying, but that’s the basic calculus.”

  “What you’re saying is that Franky’s bet was almost entirely someone else’s money.”

  “Exactly. But what’s important is whose money it was—the bank. Serial real estate investors buy properties with other people’s money all the time, but they are hitting up rich relatives or investment clubs or some other source for capital—not getting the bank to loan them ninety-five percent of the cost. That just isn’t normal. Combine that with the timing and it’s extremely suspicious. Because for a bank to put itself at that kind of risk, they’re going to do their homework. Remember Franky only created his LLC a week before the sale—for a property inside the industry standard LTV—sorry, I mean, for a normal-sized loan—a bank could easily take two or three weeks to do a proper review. Throw in the increased risk and it simply doesn’t make sense.”

  “What if they had the same inside information that he did? If they knew it was going to double in value in a couple weeks?”

  “That dampens some of the risk, but still—what’s their motivation? It wouldn’t earn the bank more money, because, remember, the lender profits by charging the borrower for the loan, not by how successfully the borrower uses it. On a large scale, banks have made money from risky bets by bundling the loans and selling them to someone else—that was the subprime mortgage crisis in a nutshell—but this is a one-off. There is no obvious gain for the bank here. At least, not a legal one.”

  “Not a legal... You mean a bribe. To the banker making the loan.”

  “A bribe, a kickback, a verbal agreement to split the profits, whatever the arrangement. There would have to be something. It happens routinely in very hot markets—think Florida or Arizona right before the crisis—collusion between a banker and someone who wants to flip a property.”

  “And because Restoration Heights needed all that land.”

  “Those blocks were as hot as it gets. It all went down fast. Franky forms Tompkins Mac, gets the financing and makes the purchase in the span of a week, then two days later Restoration Heights is announced. No way does that happen without money changing hands. And money changing hands—unlike inside information—is very, very illegal.”

  “Do you know who gave him the loan?”

  “I’ve got a few guys who owe me favors, so yeah, I found out. It was made at Bank United, downtown Brooklyn. The officer who signed off on it is named Mitchell Yang.”

  Reddick nearly dropped his phone. “That’s the guy.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “No, I’m telling you. That’s the guy. When I found all of this, the financial stuff, I saw a photo—Buckley, Franky and a guy named Mitchell. I didn’t think anything of it. Then I met this girl the other night who used to date—still kind of dates—Franky. And what she said backs up everything you’re saying. One—Franky’s cash broke. So if he wanted in on Restoration Heights he would have to borrow the money. And two—because Franky tends to drag his feet on repaying his debts, people have gotten upset with him about not paying them back, including Buckley, and also a guy she didn’t know—named Mitchell Yang.”

  “You’re sure that’s the name she said?”

  “One hundred percent. She described him—it was definitely the same guy from the photo. So these three go way back. Could Franky still owe him money from that deal?”

  “When did she hear this?’

  “In the fall.”

  “No way he would have let it go that long—but if he’s always strapped for cash he might have hit him up again. It could be a regular thing. But the sale, you know, that was three years
ago.”

  Reddick paused, the time frame knocking something loose in his mind. “Three years. What month was it?”

  “Give me a sec. August.”

  Reddick set his phone to speaker and pulled up his photos, searching until he found the image of Buckley’s check stubs. The check Buckley wrote Franky, for one hundred eighty-seven thousand dollars, was dated August, three years ago.

  “While I was in Buckley’s study I also found a checkbook.” He left his phone on speaker, tapped the image to send it.

  “Yeah.”

  “I took photos of the check stubs. I’m sending you one.”

  “Hold up.” A pause. “This is dated four days before the sale.”

  “It has to be connected, right? Maybe Buckley wanted in on this deal, too.”

  “He knew which properties Corren was targeting to make room for Restoration Heights. So if he wanted to make a little money for himself while he was at it—what’s the math here?”

  “You’re asking me?” Reddick said.

  “No, I’m thinking out loud. I’ve got the sale price—three point seven five. Five percent of that is...one hundred eighty-seven thousand.”

  “That check was the down payment.” Reddick stopped, tried to put it together. “Three friends, school buddies. Each of them had a role to play. Buckley had the information, and supplied the little capital they actually needed. Mitchell secured the loans. But Buckley couldn’t have his name on the paperwork, not with his connection to Corren.”

  “So that’s where Franky comes in. Buckley channels the down payment through him. Now Franky is listed as the buyer, Buckley stays clean.”

  “It’s more than that,” Reddick said. “The whole plan was Franky’s idea. I know it.”

  “Based on what?”

  “What were the total profits here? What did they sell it for?”

  “Corren paid six-point-seven-five. They pocketed three million clean.”

  “So let’s say they split it evenly—what’s a million dollars to Buckley? With his wealth—why risk doing anything dirty?”