Clean Hands

by Patrick Hoffman

  “Ultra lounge,” said the friend, with a shrug, as though the question were too obvious to answer.

  Still, as bad as the club was, they weren’t upset to have made the trip. It had given them an excuse to ride their motorcycles into Manhattan. They were on their way back to Sheepshead Bay, stopped at a light, when the call came in. Yuri didn’t answer, but when he saw it was Avi calling, he pointed to the corner, and when the light changed, the three men turned right onto DeKalb and then backed their bikes up against the curb. Yuri, still seated on his bike, took his helmet off, hung it on his handlebar, and returned the call.

  “You called back,” said Avi.

  “Avi—”

  “Where are you?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “Listen … I have some documents, that you … that you might …”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Legal documents.”

  “About me?”

  “No! Not about you. How do I say this—just—you would be interested in seeing them.”

  “Documents about who?”

  “They’re not about anyone, Yuri. I’m telling you: I think you might want to see them.”

  “Am I reporter? Why would I be interested in this?” He turned and made a What-the-fuck face for his brother and friend to see.

  “It’s better we talk in person,” said Avi, clearly trying to stress how important these so-called documents were. “You need to come to my office. This is big. Trust me—this is big. I guarantee you.”

  “Avi, I swear to God—I’m going to break your fucking neck.”

  “Come to my office and break my neck if you want.”

  The line went dead. Yuri looked at his brother and, speaking in Russian, reported what Avi had said. His brother shook his head and smiled. Their friend Moishe had taken off his helmet and was staring at Yuri with a flat expression.

  They headed back to Manhattan.

  Ren Xiong stood outside a fruit and vegetable market just down the block from his apartment building. He stood with the posture of a man searching for produce, but his intention was to examine the street. He didn’t expect to see anything amiss, but it would have been foolish not to stop and look.

  Will I ever see this street again? he wondered. After a moment of watching, he picked up a red apple and examined it for bruises. I need a drink, not an apple, he thought. His gaze returned to the street; he paid special attention to every car on the block. Only one of the parked cars was occupied. He watched the car for a few seconds and then entered the store. The apple cost seventy-five cents; he paid with loose change.

  Crossing the street with his shoulders slumped, Xiong headed toward his building. He took a bite of the apple and then slowed his pace so he could finish it and throw it away before he went in. As he passed the car, he glanced in and saw a young girl, probably not more than fifteen, sitting in the front passenger seat. She looked like she was daydreaming.

  Xiong’s apartment was above a Chinese meat market on Mott Street. The five-story building was filled with mostly Fuzhounese tenants. Country people. Tiny apartments, dirty hallways, bright fluorescent lights. Xiong stopped outside the meat market and threw his half-eaten apple into a trash can. He had his keys out before he reached the door. After entering his building, he closed the door in a manner that allowed him to take a final look at the street behind him. Nothing.

  He took the stairs, two at a time, to the fourth floor. In the hallway, one of his neighbors, an older woman, was just entering her apartment. Xiong pulled out his phone and slowed his pace by pretending to send a text message. When he was alone in the hall, he squatted down and examined the kit he’d set at his door. It was a small thing, just a sewing needle he’d cut down to the size of a thumbnail. He’d leaned the needle against the door near the doorframe. If anyone opened the door, the needle would fall. The needle stood.

  He still opened the door with caution—the kit didn’t address the issue of the window. Once inside his room, he exhaled, scratched his scalp, and let his eyes wander over his small space in search of anything out of the ordinary. He did this every time he entered his room, even when he’d been drinking. Everything seemed to be in order. The place looked fine.

  The act of standing near his bed brought on a desire to sleep, but he ignored it and took off his suit coat, zipped it into a black garment bag, and hung it in the back of his closet. He changed into a different pair of pants, a different button-up shirt, and a windbreaker. He wanted to look like everyone else in Chinatown. He found a wool baseball hat in the closet, put it on, and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked old, and this made him depressed.

  Xiong pulled two different suits and two shirts out of the closet and set them on the bed. He set four pairs of underwear and socks on the bed next to the suits. He pulled three T-shirts from a dresser, and one pair of polyester sweatpants. There wasn’t much else in his small apartment, but everything that remained would be picked up and disposed of tonight. The place would be scrubbed, bleached, and vacuumed by professionals.

  He set his suitcase on the bed, folded his suits into the bottom, and put the shirts and underclothes on top. He then grabbed the Chinese paperback he was reading and slipped it into one of the zip pockets. In the other, he put his toothbrush, toothpaste, and razor. He unplugged his digital clock, wrapped the power cord around it, and placed that in the suitcase too.

  After zipping his suitcase closed, he went to his tiny bathroom, filled a glass with water, and watered the two plants on his windowsill. While watering the plants, he heard the distinct sound of the front door clanging shut. He moved to the wall that ran perpendicular to the hallway and placed his ear against it. A flaw in the building’s design allowed him to hear footsteps in the stairway. He closed his eyes and listened. One person, climbing the stairs without haste.

  He returned to the bathroom, wet a piece of toilet paper, and after cleaning the dust off the sink, and a few dried drops of yellow pee off the toilet rim, he threw the paper into the toilet and flushed it down. Then he wet another piece and quickly dusted the bedside table where the clock had been.

  Rolling the suitcase behind him, Xiong stepped into the hallway and locked his door. He squatted so he could reset the needle, just in case he needed to return. Before he stood back up, his across-the-hall neighbor, a young boy, opened his own door and looked at him. Xiong had always liked the kid. He spoke to him in Chinese: “Remember, if anyone comes looking, you don’t know me.”

  “I’ll say, I don’t know you,” the kid said sleepily, like he’d just woken up from a nap.

  Elizabeth Carlyle couldn’t sit still. Every time she tried a feeling of panic began to concentrate itself in her midsection. If she stayed seated, the feeling would spread from her guts to her face and pull at her lips and temples. The area around her hairline had become damp with sweat. She didn’t feel well.

  She was walking down CDH’s hallway with no particular destination in mind; it took effort to look natural. In her mind, she tried to find some comfort by telling herself that nobody could see the way she felt. As she walked, her eyes scanned the beige carpets; they were perfectly vacuumed, but that didn’t bring the sense of comfort it sometimes did. Neither did the Corbusier furniture. The place looked dead to her.

  Right then, Jennifer Jennings, a young associate, stepped up beside her and began filling her in on one of their other cases. “Sujung said she’ll finish the motion by four p.m.,” said Jennifer, as though they were already in the middle of a conversation. “Judge McEwan’s clerk is waiting for it—thank God. Oscar Lim and Mary Ellen are doing cross prep and claim they’ll be ready by Monday.”

  “Perfect,” said Elizabeth, nodding her head and pursing her lips. Perfect, she repeated in her mind. She understood what the younger lawyer was saying but more by tone than by content. Jennifer drifted away and entered another office. She was replaced by another young associate, Vishal Desai. He was dressed in shirtsleeves.

  �
�On ABSOL, the judge has continued the hearing until the fourteenth and says—”

  “Why?” asked Elizabeth, not stopping, but turning her head and looking at the lawyer.

  “He says he has a personal family event that will interfere with—”

  “And we objected?” asked Elizabeth. This she understood. She felt her temperature rise another degree.

  “Strenuously,” said Vishal, looking appropriately nervous.

  “So, there is nothing else we can do,” said Elizabeth. For half a second she allowed her mouth to form the approximation of a smile. She was done with this conversation. Vishal was smart. He fell back as the other attorney had and entered his own office.

  Elizabeth brushed her hair back with both hands. She did it once, twice, three times. Her mind bumped around what the two attorneys had just told her, and then it drifted back to Chris Cowley and his lost phone. Instead of visiting him, she continued walking to the north side of the building where Michael D’Angelo kept his office.

  His door was closed. She knocked on it softly with the back of her hand like she was shaking dice.

  “Come in,” said the investigator.

  She stepped in and let her eyes sweep over the place. It was devoid of any signs of a personal life. No family photos, no art, no plants, not even a calendar.

  “Let me show you something,” he said. He looked down at his computer, then made a pained face at the door. “Sorry, do you mind closing that?”

  She closed his door, then walked around his desk to see the monitor. A nervous feeling bloomed in her belly. It felt like she was invading his space. She couldn’t help sniffing the air as she stepped behind his desk—it smelled like soap. The man had a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, which she examined, looking to see if he had dandruff. She didn’t see any.

  “Valencia’s guy sent us the tape,” he said.

  She wiped at the corners of her mouth. “Excellent.”

  “Okay, so—” A silence fell over them while he backed up the video. She wondered if anyone had seen her go into his office. Her eyes went to his shoulders and she felt a fleeting sexual attraction. What would he do if she reached out and massaged him?

  “So, look at this,” he said.

  She leaned closer to the screen.

  “That’s him,” said D’Angelo, hovering his cursor over the paused image of Chris Cowley. He pressed play. Elizabeth squinted and watched as Chris proceeded down a hallway inside Grand Central. She watched him bump into a man and saw both men continue on their way. The investigator backed it up again. “What’d you see?”

  “He picked his pocket?”

  “Sure, but what else?”

  “A talented thief?”

  “What else?”

  Her patience was running thin. “That they bumped?”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  Elizabeth frowned. “Play it again.”

  They watched again, and she asked what he was suggesting.

  “That they’re looking at each other.”

  “Play it,” she said.

  He hit play. They watched the bump, and then he backed it up again to the same spot where Chris appeared to look at the man he was about to bump into; the man looked at him.

  “Just tell me what you are suggesting,” she said.

  “That you should fire him.”

  Her mind replayed the calculations she’d already made. For the time being, Chris Cowley was more dangerous outside the firm. The math, once you removed the emotions, was simple. For now, she’d take him off the Calcott case and put him in a place where he couldn’t do any more damage. They’d watch him. As soon as the case was concluded, they would fire him. But she didn’t say anything; she just shook her head and frowned.

  The investigator hit the space bar and the video played again. They watched the two men bump and then go on their way. “Would you ever bump into someone like that?” he asked.

  “There are a million things I wouldn’t do,” said Elizabeth.

  “Okay Billy, today your name is Morgan D. Hallinan,” said Valencia, passing an FBI badge and photo ID forward to Billy. The photo on the identification card showed Billy’s face and Morgan’s name. The name Morgan Hallinan, if anybody checked, would trace back to a real agent with that name. “Foley Square. You remember him, right?”

  “Sure,” said Billy.

  They were in the SUV. Milton was driving, Billy rode shotgun, and Valencia sat behind them in the middle row. She’d sent Chris Cowley back to his office, telling him to sit by his desk phone and not talk to anybody. Wally Philpott had his own car and was going to meet them in the Village.

  She handed another badge forward. “And Milton, you are Alonzo J. Jones, Newark office, on special assignment with Special Agent Hallinan. Got it?”

  “Lonzo Jones,” said Milton, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  They were driving under the large, middle-class tenement buildings on Third Avenue. Pedestrians standing at crosswalks watched them pass. Valencia cupped her hand, smelled her breath, and looked at an NYPD van parked on Thirty-First Street. She put two fingers on her left wrist and measured her pulse, a leftover childhood habit.

  “We have fresh paperwork from Danny Boy,” said Valencia, turning and reaching for a stack that had come out of a printer in the back of the SUV. “It looks decent. Signed, stamp, judge, blah, blah, warrant, obstruction—you know the deal.”

  She handed the forged paper work to Billy. “Anybody asks, you show them that. We’ll start on Bleecker and head west from there.” She was leaning forward now, with both of her hands resting on the back of both men’s seats. “You’ll take the first shop on the northwest corner, I’ll jump forward one block, and we’ll continue leapfrogging until we find a deviation.” She looked at the traffic in front of her, leaned back in her seat, and breathed deeply.

  Right then, her cell phone rang. It was Roger Dewey, an old associate from her government days. He worked for the DEA now, a high-level position. She’d left a message for him ten minutes ago. “Roger, how are you, my darling?”

  He told her he was fine and laughed in a familiar way.

  “Listen, I got a real situation here,” she said. “I mean a real one. Remember Abu Dhabi?”

  She heard the sound of an exhale, a mix of grunt and laugh. He asked if this would make them even.

  “Even-steven,” she said. She dropped her voice to a seductive level: “You guys are set up with a StingRay in Grand Central, right?” she asked.

  He confirmed they were. He sounded a little uneasy with where this call might be headed.

  “Okay, I need a list of all the cell phones that travelled from the 6 train platform—”

  He cut her off and told her he couldn’t get platform-specific information in any kind of timely way.

  “Fine, so Grand Central, from 8:05 a.m., to the 6 train, Bleecker Street stop exit, 8:26 a.m.”

  He cursed and told her she was literally talking about Grand Central at rush hour.

  “I know,” she said. “Ha, ha, right?” She looked at the two men in front of her and raised her eyebrow theatrically for Billy, who had turned in his seat.

  Roger Dewey then informed her there could be thousands of numbers.

  “I’ve got someone to sift through all that,” said Valencia. “When can you get them to me?”

  Again he asked if they’d be even for Abu Dhabi—Valencia confirmed they would—and he told her he’d get the list to her within ninety minutes.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Hi to the wife.”

  After ending the call, she looked out at the street in front of them, shook her head, and said, “That guy, Jesus Christ.”

  Yuri Rabinowitz and his brother Isaac had been negotiating in Avram Lessing’s office at the American iPhone Repair shop for ten minutes. Their friend Moishe was downstairs on West Forty-Seventh Street watching their bikes, which were parked in a no-parking zone.

  “Why would I do that?” asked Avram.

  “Be
cause my uncle is not going to buy some shitty piece of paper without reading it first,” said Yuri. They spoke in English.

  His Russian friends were criminals, but he had no intention of being bossed around. Avram let his lips jut out—an expression he employed when he wanted to look serious.

  “Look,” he said, turning his monitor to the brothers. “New York Times.” He scrolled down to the picture of Elizabeth Carlyle. “You know her?”

  The brothers shook their heads no. “Listen to me, this woman is major.”

  He let that sink in. “I’m saying five thousand dollars. Come on—your uncle is going to think twice about five thousand dollars? Yuri, be reasonable.” His eyes went to Isaac to try to appeal to the younger man. Isaac, impassive as always, didn’t respond.

  “Is it reasonable to buy a suit without trying it on?” asked Yuri, sounding tired, like they’d been negotiating all day. “Do you go to the market and buy tomatoes without squeezing them? Do you buy a car without—”

  “I mean in some situations, yes,” said Avram, cutting him off. “If I buy a suit online, I don’t try it on. Sometimes in the store, I just grab tomatoes, no squeezing, especially if it’s a good store, you don’t squeeze at my dude’s place. A car from an auction? How many cars have I bought at auction?” He pretended to count on his hand. “You know what they call this?”

  “Save it,” said Yuri.

  “Listen, Yuri, I brought this to you because you are my friend. Because of that I will offer these documents to you and your uncle for five thousand dollars.”

  “This is one of the worst offers I’ve ever heard,” said Yuri. He turned and glanced at his brother, who was sitting with his eyes closed.

  “And because I respect your uncle, I will offer you—and him, mind you, and him—a money-back guarantee on these papers. You pay me, I give you the thumb drive. If you don’t like what you see, you get your money back.”

  To show how generous he was being, Avram frowned and held both hands up. “But with this special guarantee that I offer you now, today, because you’re a friend, then I must say, if your uncle ends up liking what he sees, you give me another twenty-five hundred.”