by Wil Medearis
“Then he flipped it for twice as much.”
“I never had good luck. I work hard, I have a generous spirit, but I never had good luck. I thought that was all it was. But months went by, years, and I watched the towers come up, and the stories rolled in about the money they paid for that land, the holdouts getting triple the old market value. Those towers were like two stakes in my heart. Not like for those fool protesters—but because I knew I had been swindled.
“Franky’s name was the only one on the paperwork but I knew he had friends. Inside information—that’s that white game, everybody knows it. But I like games, too. And I figured I could make this right. So I sent Mia after him. She’s retired now but in her time she was unstoppable. I knew she could make him talk. A few dates and he admitted the whole thing to her. Bragged is the better word. She found out who his partners were, went to that fat banker first, and barely had to whisper fraud before he talked—never mind that she had no proof. He’s crooked all the way down. But I’m fair. I pride myself in that. So I let Mitchell keep a little something—a quarter of the million he made off my properties, to take the sting out of my proposition.”
“But you still needed money from the other two.”
“I had a problem—how could Franky make things right if he was broke? The money he took from me was long spent. Then Mia told me who the third man in their little conspiracy was—Buckley Seward. Seward. I recognized that name. Unlike Hannah I appreciate culture—I’ve been to our timid Brooklyn Museum, which begs for attention in the looming shadow of her Manhattan sisters. You go to museums? You see names branded on galleries, on hallways. But the Sewards—they got an entire wing. So I thought, this boy can help his friend out. There is more than enough Seward money to cover Franky’s share. The question was how to get to him.”
“You sent Hannah to find something you could squeeze him with.”
“I’d already used my best girl on Franky.”
“Hey,” Hannah said.
“It’s the truth, girl. Smart, ambitious and tits the size of your face. When I let her open that store I lost a weapon. You aren’t without talents, though.”
Hannah frowned and took another hit from the joint.
“She’s better at playing the Sewards’ type anyway. She seems uncouth now but classy is her specialty. Look at those perfect teeth.” Hannah, obliging, smiled.
“You rented an apartment for her, set up a fake identity.”
The Genie waved her hands, dismissed the effort. “I already owned an apartment in the city, from back when I thought the island was the path to legitimate money. I gave her a new last name, a hometown on the other side of the country so it wouldn’t look suspicious that they hadn’t met her folks.”
“Then you got her into that reception, had her approach his dad.”
“I did my research this time. Flatter his vain father, submit to his regal mother—at first that was just to catch his interest. I didn’t think she would have to go so far. I didn’t think she would have to get engaged to the son of a bitch—but then, I didn’t know about Tony. My bad luck showing up again. I thought it might blow the whole plan up—how could she get close if Buckley preferred a manlier shoulder to cry on? But give Hannah credit—she played it smart, she made his situation work for us. Because his parents wanted Tony sidelined, wanted their son to have a proper wife, wanted a mother for their grandkids, and my girl made sure they knew she was ripe for the job. Once they were on her side the boy couldn’t say no for long.”
“When he went to look for her that morning—you left him a blackmail note,” Reddick said. “That’s why he was so shaken when he came back.”
“Not a note. An email.” The Genie turned to Hannah. “Did you delete that file?”
“I still have it.” She typed for a moment, summoned an audio recording and held the phone out, the speaker toward Reddick. He heard a conversation, two voices. It took a moment for him to recognize one as Hannah. Her enunciation was cleaner, more precise, unmistakably upper middle class, private college. The second voice was Buckley.
“What were you fighting about?”
“I don’t want to get into it, honestly. Franky can be terribly frustrating.”
“Buckles. You’ve been so tense lately. Don’t you think you might feel better if we talked about it?”
There was a pause, a rustle of clothes. Reddick glanced at Hannah. She was grinning, a starlet basking in her Oscar reel.
“You’re right, Hannie.” A long, heavy sigh. “It’s this money I gave him.”
“Is he refusing to pay you back?”
“It’s not like that. It wasn’t a loan, it was for a deal. For this idea he had that I should never have gone along with.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was three years ago, before Restoration Heights was announced—I don’t want to bore you.”
“I want to help.”
“Okay, but I hope it isn’t difficult for you to follow. So back then, Franky and a friend of ours, Mitchell, had this idea, to flip some properties that were inside the territory we had marked off for Restoration Heights. They wanted to buy before we announced, then sell to it Corren afterwards. I’d told them Corren was in a hurry. I was in their strategic meetings, I knew they wanted momentum to push it past the local resistance. Market value would double for everything inside the zone once Corren started buying. Franky’s plan didn’t seem so bad, a little cash on the side.”
“So what was wrong about it?”
“Mitchell approved all the financing, then got a third of the profits—it would be very easy for a lawyer to make the case that we paid Mitchell to approve our loan. That’s illegal, Hannie. Then last year some local thug squeezed Mitchell because of it—Franky confessed the whole thing to some, I don’t know—escort—that he was with, and she told her boss. At least, that’s what Mitchell claims. How could Franky be so stupid. They tried to keep it from me but Mitchell finally told me, warned me, and I confronted Franky about it tonight. It’s all so sordid—I’m sorry to drag you into this.”
“My poor Buckles—it’s okay. The more I know, the more I can help you.”
The Genie waved her finger and Hannah stopped the playback.
“It goes on like that, the fool babbling more details, blaming Franky for the very thing he was in the act of doing—the irony is my favorite part. I sent him an email with my demands, with this attached to it. It was important that he knew exactly what he was being punished for, that I wasn’t using anything against him that he hadn’t earned. Once that was done I let Hannah decide how she wanted to leave.”
Hannah exhaled a small cloud of dank smoke. “I’ve always been partial to Irish goodbyes.”
Reddick turned to her. “I barely recognized your voice.”
“Accents are my thing. I can do South Boston, rich Boston, Long Island, Ohio, pretty much whatever you want.” She shrugged haphazardly. “I always liked pretending.”
“That recording was enough, then? To force him to play along?”
“He paid me three days ago,” the Genie said. “Whether it was his fear of being exposed, or the intensity of his shame at being so thoroughly, so easily duped—in the end it doesn’t matter. Because he paid in full.”
“Him putting me off—he was just trying to cover his tracks.”
“You didn’t make it easy. Blind as you were—you got my people so worked up thinking you were going to expose Mia and Ju’waun, as if I didn’t already know what those two were doing. If she wants to play star-crossed lover to Tyler’s wannabe cousin I couldn’t care less—but I like to cultivate a certain reputation, to keep everyone in line, so when your drunk accomplice started asking questions of some of my boys, I guess it was only natural that they got amped up. Once Ju’waun told me who you were really after, I knew it would come to this. I read you before I saw you—I understood who
you were from your barest description. Earnest and lost, desperate to attach yourself to something that matters, too dumb and too stubborn to end up anywhere other than sitting across from me.”
“Jeannie, why are we telling this guy all of this?”
“Because he did a rare thing, Hannah. He earned it. He spent the last nine days burying himself alive, one shovel at a time, trying to find out what happened to that poor blonde girl who wanted to kiss him in an alley.”
“I wanted to kiss him?”
“Trying to save her, you believe that?”
Reddick felt his body sink into the generous leather. He had uncovered a plot without villains. There was no one to accept the blame—just a network of escalating grievances, of desolate people, of injuries repaid in kind. He had thought it was revenge, but revenge is always personal, always intuitive—an expression of emotion, like tears. There was nothing like that here. Only cold business and patterns of exploitation, a cycle in which all the names were replaceable. There was nothing to expose, no one who needed saving, who needed justice. There was, finally, no Hannah. Just some girl with her name and her face.
The Genie leaned forward. “Now you know. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
“I told you. I just came to see. To know for sure.”
“You could go to the police.”
He thought about Clint and his detective friend—the biases they would bring, which crimes they would investigate and which they would ignore, who would suffer most. If he took every name from his map and threw them into the mill of justice, he knew who would emerge unscathed, and why. There was no way to tell anyone without picking a side.
“Or you could go to the press. Add all of this to the case against Restoration Heights. Buckley Seward’s little scheme to rip off a poor old black woman. Try to direct the blaze of outrage to your pet cause. You know you can’t stop it. Maybe you believe you could contain it.”
“There’s no way to do that without exposing you.”
“Probably not.”
“I don’t think you would let me.”
“What would I do to stop you? I’m not a murderer, Reddick. I’m a businesswoman. If you haven’t learned that by now, I wonder what all of this was for.”
“So I can go?”
“Answer me first. What are you going to do?”
He stood up. “I think you know.”
The Genie smiled. Hannah was back on her phone, thumb scrolling for a diversion with more meaning or interest than the person passing a few feet from her body.
“You think there is nothing you could prove.”
“It’s worse than that. There’s nothing I care about proving.”
He turned and walked out, back through the rows of hanging clothes sheathed in plastic. TJ was nowhere to be found. Reddick smashed the bell on the counter, the one-note ring echoing like a brief scream in the small lobby. He hit it again, violently, then two more times in quick succession, and then again, repeatedly hammering the thin metal until the panicked ringing was beaten into a broken, arid click. He snatched it up and slung it at the wall, was rewarded with one final despairing chime before he walked outside.
The clouds were low and thick, shifting in the damp wind. A spring he couldn’t feel yet was gathering. He wandered, dazed. He reached into his pocket and removed his phone. There were seven messages, all from Derek, descending from concern to fear and finally a plea. I’m coming back. Just call me and let me know you haven’t gotten yourself killed. He looked up and saw that he was standing in front of the entrance to the G stop at Bedford Avenue. A rush hour train had just arrived. Bodies streamed up from the tunnel, almost all of them white, young, home from a long day wrestling the city. They flowed east and west into the arteries of their new neighborhood, the spoils of their bloodless conquest. He stood on the corner, watched them all come—faces like his, skin like his, speaking a language he never learned. He slipped his phone into his pocket. He was surrounded by them, consumed—you can look and look but you’ll never see the difference.
* * *
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to Kate Garrick, who made this possible and who not only understands where I’m from but also understands why that matters. I also owe a huge thanks to John Glynn of Hanover Square Press for his enthusiasm and insight, and for having the vision to bring out the best in this book. Thank you to all my readers for their honest feedback, Rachael, Ben, Ivanny and especially Eli. I am a better writer for their candor. Thank you to Brian and Mark for their primer on the NYPD and gangs, to Ray for helping me unknot the tangle of Brooklyn real estate, to Josie and Agnes for helping me get this book out of my apartment and into the world, and to everyone at the Bedford-Stuyvesant YMCA, my home-away-from-home, for treating me like family.
Most importantly, I’d like to thank my wife, Holly Frisbee, for her optimism, her relentless belief and her unwavering love through all those years when we had nothing but those things to sustain us. We did it, darling.
ISBN-13: 9781488098659
Restoration Heights
Copyright © 2019 by Wil Medearis
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5H 4E3, Canada.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com