One Fell Swoop

by David Linzee

  “You live in the neighborhood?”

  “Right here.”

  He pointed at a small brick apartment house, typical of Parkdale. They turned into an alley. A row of garages sat behind the building. Don pulled into one and stopped short. A man was lying on flattened boxes against the far wall. He put up a hand to shield his eyes. Don leaned out the window and said, “Sorry, Wayne. I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the way while I pull in. For your safety.”

  Wayne was encumbered with so many layers of clothes that he looked like the Michelin Man. He lumbered to his feet and backed against the wall. His gray hair was lank and disorderly. He watched in silence, eyes wide, as the Jaguar pulled in. Still without a word, he scrambled back to his bed under its front bumper.

  As they got out, Peter noticed the line of beer cans and empty Everclear bottles along the wall. He said, “Does Wayne sleep in your garage often?”

  “When it’s chilly or rainy. One can’t converse with him. It makes him nervous. But he’s very considerate about his toileting, so I don’t call the police.”

  “Another great touch for the article,” said Peter ironically.

  Again, Don topped him. “Be sure to add that I’m worried about him now winter’s coming. I’m going to have to persuade him to go to a shelter.”

  They climbed the fire escape at the back of the building to the second floor and went in. When they were settled in the comfortable living room with bottles of Schlafly IPA in hand, Peter looked Don in the eye and said, “Where’s your financing coming from?”

  “People I’ve talked to about the bright future of Parkdale.”

  “How many backers do you have?” According to Renata, there was only one.

  “Several. I’m quite persuasive.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I’ve just told you.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Rather slow on the uptake, aren’t you, old son? That’s all you get.”

  Peter snapped his notebook closed and put it away. “If we go off the record, will you be honest with me?”

  Don smiled triumphantly, and Peter realized that this was the point he’d been driving Peter to all day. Don said, “If you’ll be honest with me.”

  “All right.”

  “What really brought you to Parkdale?”

  “Renata told me you were buying property in St. Louis. It was my idea to pursue it, so don’t blame her. The rest I got off the internet.”

  “I figured it was something like that.”

  “Your turn. This isn’t the real Don Radleigh I just spent the day with. What are you up to?”

  “Actually, it is.” Seeing Peter’s expression, Don held up a placating hand. “I won’t deny I was having a bit of fun with you. But I have changed.”

  “Quite a change. You’ve never shown a scintilla of social conscience.”

  “After what I went through last spring—”

  “You mean, when your sister got you out of jail?”

  Don blinked and started again. Peter had never heard him acknowledge that Renata had saved him. “After the ordeal I went through, I began to question my values. The way I’d lived my life up to then. Does the name John Profumo ring a bell?”

  “Tory cabinet minister in the ’60s. Caught sharing a call girl with a Soviet diplomat. Resigned in disgrace.”

  “Got it in one. I forgot what a history boffin you are. Do you know what he did after he resigned? The very next day, he went to a homeless shelter in East London and asked if he could make himself useful. They gave him a broom and he started sweeping. Spent the rest of his life there, ending up as president of the charity.”

  “You’re saying you’re like Profumo?”

  “I was caught in a sex scandal and resigned in disgrace, so yes. I got myself a real estate license and started selling houses in the suburbs. But something kept gnawing at me. I thought, anyone can do this. I’ll try to do something harder. I’ll try to do good.”

  “Don, Joel and his friends have been trying to bring Parkdale back for thirty years.”

  “Well, now I’m in it with them. For as long as it takes.”

  Chapter Five

  Instead of going home, Peter cycled over the highway to the fashionable neighborhood called the Central West End, where he went to the local branch of the public library, borrowed a laptop, and set to work. He hoped to get the article done before his beer buzz wore off. As Don had promised, it would be a very easy article to write, provided Peter did not dwell on the fact that he didn’t believe any of it. He was most suspicious of the “sincere” part at the end.

  He felt sheepish about admitting to Renata how far he’d gone with his inquiries. He was relieved it was too late to call her. She would be sound asleep after a long day of rushing around London doing auditions.

  Rushing around London. Peter had never been there—he had crossed an ocean only to visit Hawaii, left the country only to see Mexico—but he had majored in English literature, so he imagined Renata rushing around Charles Dickens’ London. Fighting her way through ankle-deep mud and fog and rain, jostled by Cockneys, pick-pocketed by street urchins, elbowed into the gutter by rich, mean lawyers. Lost among crowds of people who didn’t know how special she was. If only somebody would give her a job today.

  Half his mind occupied by such musings, he knocked the article off and called Joel Rubinstein. As he was mentally composing his message, Joel picked up. He invited Peter to bring the article right over, and gave an address.

  It was a chilly night with a scent of impending rain. The streets of Parkdale were deserted, except for cars going very fast and playing rap very loud. Some floated on eerie purple light. Peter’s destination turned out to be a four-story apartment building on an intersection a block up from the main drag. He locked his bike to a fence and rang the bell. Over the intercom, Joel told him to climb to the top floor.

  Joel was waiting to wave him in. The lights were off in the sparsely furnished apartment. A man was standing at each window, looking down through binoculars. A video camera stood on a tripod in the middle of the floor.

  “Some of my fellow landlords in the neighborhood association,” Joel explained. “We’re looking for drug dealers.”

  “The streets are pretty empty.”

  “Oh, the usual action is going on. You just have to know where to look.”

  “You’ve been doing this for a long time?”

  “Dealer vigil is a regular activity. We use a different apartment every week. We all have plenty of empty ones. When we see a deal going down, we videotape it. When we have enough tapes, I take ’em to the city prosecutor. Try to persuade him to encourage the police to arrest a few dealers.”

  “They’re reluctant? Are they being paid off?”

  “Nah. Just can’t be bothered. The jails are full of dealers already.”

  There was a distraction as one of the men at a window called for the camera. Peter moved to the window to see a car pulling to the curb and a thin, hooded figure emerging from the shadows to lean into its window. But drugs and money had changed hands and the car pulled away before the camera could be set up.

  “Car buys are no loss,” said Joel with a shrug. “The prosecutor always says the driver was just asking for directions. Want to show me what you’ve got, Peter?”

  They went into a windowless kitchen, where Joel turned on the overhead light. Peter noticed the new fridge and stove and the granite counter. “This is nicer than my apartment,” he said.

  “You’re welcome to it. Doesn’t do me much good having nice apartments, if people have to walk by drug dealers and burned-out buildings to get to them.”

  Peter laid a print-out of the article on the counter. Joel put on his glasses and read it carefully. “The Neighbor News will be delighted to publish this,” he pronounced.

  “Thanks.”

  “What else did you find out?”

  Peter said miserably, “Nothing.”

  “He just bulls
hitted you?”

  “Yep.”

  Joel folded his bare, muscular arms and gave Peter a hard stare. “In that case, I’ll just have to cut your pay.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “That’s not the answer I was looking for.”

  Peter gave him a questioning look.

  “How about this. I’ll pay you the full amount, and you keep digging.”

  “I don’t know what else I can do.”

  Joel pulled two stools from under the counter. Sitting on one, he offered the other to Peter. “This Radleigh guy has me worried. Has us all worried. He’s been buying too many buildings, too quickly. I can think of only two explanations.”

  “What are they?”

  “Radleigh and his backers just aren’t very smart. They don’t realize how much it costs to rehab buildings, especially the really beat-up ones he’s buying. They don’t know how low rents are around here. The profit margins are paper-thin. They’re gonna lose their money.”

  “Which will be bad for Parkdale.”

  “The other possibility would be worse. You know what Section 8 housing is?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “The feds pay most or all the rent for poor people. Good idea, but there’s a problem. Since the rent’s guaranteed, landlords don’t bother to screen tenants. They let sleazy people in who trash the places. They deteriorate until no one’s willing to live in them anymore. In this neighborhood, we have too many empty buildings already. And Radleigh is buying them up.”

  “So you think he’s going to spend the bare minimum to bring them up to code, then rent them to sleazebags and cash the government checks.”

  “A landlord can make money that way. For a while.”

  “But the neighborhood goes downhill fast.”

  “If Radleigh’s working for a slumlord, we’re fucked. So we’d be very grateful for any information you could provide.”

  Peter thought it over and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Chapter Six

  In London the days were growing noticeably shorter. Dawn was coming later, and getting up was harder. Renata was luxuriating guiltily in bed when her mobile pinged. It was a text message from Peter, asking her to turn on Skype. She booted up her laptop, which told her that it was two a.m. in St. Louis. Something had to be wrong. She drummed her fingers nervously while waiting for the computer to find the satellite.

  At last Peter came up on the screen, leaning on an elbow and hanging his head. He looked both stubborn and contrite, the way he’d looked when she took him to Der Rosenkavalier, and he told her at the interval that wild horses couldn’t drag him back in for Act II.

  He said, “Has Don called to complain about me?”

  “What? No, I haven’t heard from him at all. What would he be complaining about?”

  “My prying into his affairs.”

  “He knows? But you said you were only going to look on the internet.”

  “What I found there was disturbing enough that I had to go on.”

  “Oh, lord. Is Don in trouble?”

  “No. The Parkdale landlords are.”

  “What’s Parkdale?”

  He explained. She was a bit annoyed with him for breaking his promise to her to leave Don alone. But it seemed that Don had already punished him for it. The Skype page had a small window that showed her own face, and she was struggling to hide her amusement as Peter recounted how Don had toyed with him. Once he got into his talk with Joel Rubinstein, she no longer felt like laughing.

  She said, “I can see you’ve taken a liking to this Joel bloke.”

  “He and his fellow landlords spend their days patching the wounds of these old buildings with their own hands, their evenings keeping drug dealer vigil, and their nights worrying about their bank loans. And the neighborhood is balanced on a knife edge.”

  “Sounds like you’re writing the story in your head already.”

  “I’ve already turned in the story.”

  “And you hate every word of it. I am sorry my brother was so exasperating to you.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “Do you really think Don’s working for a slumlord?”

  “I have my doubts about Joel’s theory.”

  “You don’t think Don could sink so low?”

  “Sure he could. But I don’t think his boss would bother. A London billionaire, setting up as a St. Louis slumlord? There can’t be enough profit in it to justify his trouble. No, this is something bigger. But I can’t imagine what.”

  “Possibly even Don doesn’t know what his boss has planned.”

  “What?”

  “Well, maybe he’s being used. Why are you staring at me like that, Peter? Is there a reception problem or something?”

  “No. I can’t believe what you just said. You actually think he believes he’s going to save the neighborhood?”

  “I admit the Profumo bit touched me.”

  “It was bullshit.”

  An equally curt retort leapt to her lips, but she kept them clamped tight. She and Peter had never had an all-out row. They were bound to someday, but she’d resolved it was not going to be about her brother. She asked a neutral question. “What about the gardener? Do you think she’s really his girlfriend?”

  “I think she thinks she is. But Don in love with a woman who has dirt under her fingernails?”

  “Not his usual form.”

  “But you think he’s changed.”

  “He has,” Renata said, “in some ways. He’s much less nasty to me. He doesn’t say those things he used to say, like you’re an aging journeyman, or you’re past your sell-by date.”

  “What a prince. Maybe someday he’ll manage to thank you for getting him out of jail.”

  Her temper threatened to flare again. This was her brother he was talking about. Time for another neutral question. “What are you planning to do next?”

  “Follow him.”

  “Peter, you don’t know how to follow people.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. When I was on the paper, one of the investigative reporters had me following a bagman for a corrupt politician. I got pictures of him collecting bribes. After the story ran, he went to prison and the politician was kicked out of office.”

  “And what are you hoping to do to my brother?”

  It brought Peter up short. “This is not personal, Renata.”

  “It is to me. Naturally, I feel loyal toward him.”

  “Why?”

  A reporter to the core, Peter was fond of the blunt question. She said, “He wasn’t always like this. I have fond memories from when we were children.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well … there was a time … when I was eight, I believe, and Don was five. We shared a bedroom. Our flat was on a high floor of a tower block. There was a terrific storm. The thunder was coming simultaneous with the lightning, and I was just old enough to know that meant the storm was right on top of us. I thought a bolt of lightning was going to blast through the window and hit me. Don heard me whimpering. He asked if I wanted to come in with him. I hesitated, because I was the big sister. But in the end I did. I still remember how warm and safe I felt under the duvet with him. It makes up for a lot of irritating behavior.”

  “I can understand that, I guess. When did he begin to develop into the Don of today?”

  “Things changed before we got much older. It’s hard to believe now, but people made a terrific fuss over me when I was a young pianist. Then a young singer. Our parents were always driving me to competitions. Don was still too young to be left home alone, and of course he was bored frantic. And if I won, the local newspaper would send a photographer ’round. It was hard on Don.”

  Peter smiled. “So Don turning out the way he did is your fault. He’s your responsibility through life.”

  “No, of course not. I’ll be quite happy to let the chips fall as they may in Parkdale, and I wish you would, too.” She glanced at her face in the little window. Her eyes were
widening dangerously. Her nostrils were actually flaring. Any more mockery from Peter and she’d lose her temper.

  But he backed off. Literally. He leaned away from the screen and dropped his gaze. He was sensitive to her feelings, in a way none of her previous boyfriends had been. In fact, she used to wonder if men went in for sensitivity at all.

  He said, “Renata, let’s say for the sake of argument—”

  “I don’t want to do argument any favors. I want to slam the door in its face.”

  “So do I. But let’s say you’re right about Don. He wants to do good in Parkdale. This London billionaire has other plans and is using him. You really want to let the chips fall?”

  She thought it over and sighed. “No, I suppose not. All right, do your Philip Marlowe routine. But be careful.”

  Chapter Seven

  Renata had a busy day ahead. After her usual breakfast of an orange, a banana, and a cup of tea, she fell in with the rush-hour crowd headed downhill to Ladbroke Grove Station. Her brain was busy.

  No wonder Peter found it hard to understand her contradictory feelings about Don, how he annoyed her when they were together, worried her when they were not. The Lombardos were a big, robust Italian-American family, even if some of their old-country traits, like love of opera, had faded.

  He had three siblings. All his parents and grandparents were alive. He had uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, cousins and in-laws. In the usual American fashion, they were spread across their vast country, from Montana to Florida, and seldom got together, but Facebook and phone calls regularly brought news of weddings, decisions to move in together, and births. The Lombardos were being fruitful and multiplying.

  The Radleighs were dwindling. In fact, they were an endangered species.

  Once they’d been a prolific and energetic Victorian family. Renata had visited country churchyards where their headstones stood in rows, driven through suburbs they had laid out and named the streets for themselves and their in-laws, rented storage lockers for their diaries and letters home from the colonies. Radleighs had been quite keen on serving the Empire, and two world wars had taken a shocking toll on the men. The family was knocked off balance. Temperance and common sense deserted the Radleighs, along with luck.