Clean Hands

by Patrick Hoffman

  The car was still crowded with late-morning commuters; she eased her way to the front of it so she could watch all the passengers. Two of the three that boarded in Queens were African American women: Valencia felt fairly confident they weren’t with Redgrave. The third was a bespectacled older white man; he looked eccentric, and he got off two stops later.

  During the ride from Queens through Manhattan, she thought about what she was about to do. She’d never ordered a hit before. During her time abroad, she’d been involved in plenty of operations where people were killed, but she’d never given the order herself. She noticed that she wasn’t particularly bothered by the prospect, at least not overly so. It simply had to be done.

  She rode all the way to the Kings Highway stop in South Brooklyn. After getting off the train, she took a moment to look at the blue sky, then fussed with her bag until she was sure she’d be the last person walking down the stairs. The MTA attendant in his glass booth was the only person who watched her leave.

  Outside a black car sat waiting for fares. After approaching it and exchanging thumbs-up signs, she opened the door and got in. The car smelled, not unpleasantly, like cocoa butter. The driver, an older Jamaican man, asked her where she wanted to go.

  “Can you please take me to 2783 East Sixty-Sixth Street—Mill Basin,” she said.

  “Sixty-Sixth, out there in Mill Basin?” he asked, with his accent.

  “Yes, sir.”

  They made their way east on Kings Highway, passing beauty salons, hardware stores, Chinese barbecue places, perfumeries, jewelers, and pharmacies. As they went, Valencia turned in her seat and looked out the back window. All that she saw was a bus. Nobody appeared to be following her.

  She then pulled out the manila envelope and checked it one more time. It was all the information that Danny Tsui had found regarding Jack Glasser. There was a bio pulled from the Prexius Solar Solutions website that showed a picture of Jack Glasser—unquestionably the same man as Jonathan Redgrave. The photo showed him smiling; he wore on oxford shirt. His bio stated that he had received his master’s degree from Stanford and earned his PhD from the University of Texas.

  It said he’d worked for eight years at a firm in Boston and six years in China. It didn’t mention anything about the army or the Department of Defense. The rest of the paperwork was database material for the half dozen John and Jack Glassers in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. That’s all Danny could find. Valencia put the papers back in the envelope and placed the envelope back in the bag.

  After a few minutes of riding in silence, the driver—apropos of nothing—said, “It’s my birthday today.”

  “How old are you?” asked Valencia, leaning forward.

  “Seventy-one years old.”

  “You don’t look a day over fifty,” she said.

  He squinted in the rearview. “I drink my water and eat my greens.”

  They rode in silence for the rest of the way. When the driver stopped in front of the address, she asked how much.

  “Ten dollars,” he said, looking like he was ashamed to ask for anything.

  Valencia dug money out of her pants pocket, pulled off two twenties and passed them forward. “Keep the change,” she said. “Happy birthday.”

  She let the car drive away and then turned and walked eight doors down to the actual address. During the walk, she pulled off the wig, brushed her hair with her hand, and then stuffed the wig into the pocket of her jacket. The house was larger than she imagined, almost a mansion. The metal gate surrounding the driveway had been left open, and Valencia couldn’t help interpreting that as a good sign.

  There was a black Mercedes SUV parked in the driveway. The blinds in all of the first-floor windows had been drawn. Valencia walked up the driveway and headed toward the door. When she pressed the doorbell, a series of low gongs sounded. She took a final deep breath.

  After a few seconds she heard the sounds of locks being turned, and then she watched as the door opened. An older, Filipina-looking woman stood at the threshold with a questioning look on her face.

  Valencia smiled. “Is Mr. Rabinowitz in?”

  The woman’s eyes went up and down Valencia, like she was wearing something scandalous. She made a face like she was upset, and then called out behind her, “Maestro, a woman here to see you.”

  Valencia leaned forward so she could peer into the doorway, just as Yakov Rabinowitz came walking toward her. He was drying his hands on a towel and squinting at the light. He had a suspicious look on his face. When he saw it was Valencia calling, he smiled widely.

  After exchanging greetings, and still standing at the door, Yakov asked her what she was doing.

  “I’m sorry to drop by unannounced,” said Valencia. “But I have to return what you gave me. I’ll have one of my assistants bring it to you.”

  Yakov Rabinowitz looked over her shoulder at the street behind her, confirming she was alone. “Come in,” he said.

  She stepped past him.

  As they walked down the hallway, Valencia reached into her tote bag and pulled out the manila envelope with the Jack Glasser bio. “There is something I need to talk to you about, though” she said.

  That same afternoon, Elizabeth Carlyle was in the middle of reviewing a colleague’s motion to enforce judgment when Scott Driscoll marched into her office. “Look at this,” he said, holding his iPhone out to her.

  She pushed herself back from her desk, took the phone out of his hand, held it at a readable distance, and saw a story on CNN’s website. The headline read “Emerson Trust Bank’s Unseemly Swaps.” She skimmed through to the second paragraph: Recently leaked discovery from the civil suit shows that Emerson Trust Bank has been engaging in a practice of sham defaults, bringing back memories of the 2008 financial crisis.

  “Are we in this?” she asked.

  “Only in relation to the lawsuit,” said Scott.

  “Jesus,” said Elizabeth.

  “Yeah,” said Scott. “Mutual and total destruction.”

  Elizabeth’s intercom sounded. “I have Jimmy Hipps on line one,” said her assistant.

  Elizabeth picked up her phone, pressed the button for line one, and turned her eyes to Scott. “Hi, Jimmy,” she said.

  “There is an article on CNN’s—”

  “I’m reading it right now,” said Elizabeth.

  “It’s worse than ours. Sandoval’s gonna have a stroke,” he said, referring to the judge.

  “Jimmy, I have Scott in my office,” she said. “I’m going to put you on speaker.”

  “Scotty, how are you?” asked Jimmy Hipps.

  “I’m fine, but this is not good.”

  “What hurts my enemies—”

  “No, Jimmy, please, listen,” said Elizabeth, interrupting him, and motioning for Scott to shut his mouth. “Jimmy, all roads lead back to the same place, and none of it is good. You guys were doing the same shit. This is an industry-wide problem. Tell Nathan and all of them to be expecting calls. Listen to me. This is the script: ‘We are in the middle of a lawsuit and we’ve been instructed by the judge not to comment.’ That’s it.”

  “Is this from your kid’s phone?” asked Jimmy Hipps. She’d told Jimmy about Chris’s suicide during a call the previous night.

  “Hold on a second,” said Elizabeth. She jabbed the mute button, looked at Scott. “This Emerson stuff wasn’t on Chris’s phone, was it?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Scott.

  “Call Sujung, ask her, and tell her to join us.” She unmuted the phone. “Sorry Jimmy—we are checking on that, but we don’t initially think so.”

  “We got a ship that’s leaking from top to bottom,” said Jimmy Hipps.

  Elizabeth looked at Scott, who was speaking to Sujung on the phone. Scott covered his phone and said, “She says, no.”

  “None of this was on Chris’s phone,” said Elizabeth.

  “Judge is gonna say this is retaliation for the Bloomberg story,” said Jimmy Hipps.

  �
�Yeah, well, it isn’t, so he can say whatever the fuck he wants,” said Elizabeth.

  “I’m sorry?” said Jimmy Hipps.

  “I said, it isn’t, so he can say whatever he wants.”

  Right then Sujung Kim came into the room. She was out of breath and looked frightened.

  Elizabeth’s cell phone buzzed. She picked it up and saw Ben Alden—another in-house counsel from Calcott—was calling. She texted him: Talking to Jimmy, call you right back, and hit send.

  Elizabeth couldn’t help but smile. “Ben’s calling on my other line,” she said into the phone.

  “Jesus, I’ll get him in here,” said Jimmy Hipps. They listened while he yelled at his secretary to get Ben Alden into his office.

  “Chris Cowley only had D1 through D44, E, M, MM, and part of Q on his phone,” said Sujung, reading from a notepad. Elizabeth noticed a dark area around the woman’s armpits. She made a mental note to tell her to get them botoxed.

  “Jimmy, why don’t you call us back when Ben joins you?”

  “Okay, two minutes,” said Jimmy Hipps.

  Elizabeth hung up, looked at Scott, shook her head, and said, “I’d like to see how they’re taking this over at Emerson.”

  “Welcome to the jungle,” said Scott.

  “Tell me about it,” said Elizabeth.

  Later that same evening, Valencia joined Elizabeth at a French restaurant in Midtown.

  “Madame is waiting for you,” said the maître d’.

  Valencia followed him into the place and saw Elizabeth seated near a window, texting on her phone. The restaurant was only half full, the lights were dim, and it smelled like butter.

  “Sorry I’m late,” said Valencia, touching Elizabeth’s shoulder and gliding toward her seat.

  “I ordered wine,” said Elizabeth.

  Valencia sat down and studied Elizabeth’s face. “Look at you,” she said. “Unflappable.”

  “When things are at their worst,” said Elizabeth. She poured Valencia some Bordeaux and then refilled her own glass. “Cheers.”

  They touched glasses and Valencia made a show of smelling the wine and tasting it carefully. She puckered her lips, shook out her napkin, and placed it on her lap. She looked outside the window, noticed a white van parked across the street, and memorized the plate.

  “You saw the CNN thing?” asked Elizabeth.

  “I did,” said Valencia.

  “You know,” said Elizabeth, dropping her head to one side, “I never asked you if anybody ever approached you about this case.”

  Valencia felt her autonomic nervous system kick on, a small army of nerves being summoned to battle. “Anybody like …?” She squinted.

  “Anybody like anyone from the press, or you know, how do I say this?” Elizabeth pretended to think. “Interested parties.”

  “You know I’d tell you if anybody did that.”

  Elizabeth, who had seemed buzzed, now appeared suddenly sober. “I know you would, but I never asked,” she said.

  “Well, in that case, the answer is still, no.”

  “Enemies on all sides,” said Elizabeth. “Within and without.”

  “So, what’re you going to do?”

  “With what?”

  “With the case,” said Valencia.

  “Prepare for war.” She made a face and peered over Valencia’s shoulder, searching for a waiter.

  Valencia looked at her glassy-eyed friend and smiled. “Don’t you wish it would just go away?” she asked.

  “No,” said Elizabeth. “I’m just getting warmed up.” She shifted in her seat. “They can smell desperation.”

  “Who?” asked Valencia.

  “Everyone. So, no, I don’t want this case to go away—not ever. I want it to go on and on, and I want it to go to trial, and I want to take it to a jury, and I want the jury to say that we won, that we are the best, and then I want to get a very large bonus at the end of the year.”

  Valencia leaned forward, looked her dead in the eyes, and whispered, “It just seems like this might be one where it would be better if everybody would just stand down. Just walk away. It feels like this might be bigger than Calcott”—she paused for a moment, searched her mind—“and Emerson.”

  Elizabeth squinted like an act of treason had occurred. Someone in the kitchen dropped a platter.

  Someone outside honked. “You’re a naughty girl, aren’t you?” Elizabeth said.

  Valencia smiled, leaned back. “What are you going to order?”

  “The rib-eye, rare.”

  “Me too,” said Valencia.

  Elizabeth filled their glasses. “To Chris Cowley,” she said. They clinked glasses. Elizabeth kept hers raised, so Valencia did too. “He was—rest his soul—an obnoxious kid. But he was a kid. He should never have died over any of this.”

  It almost seemed that Elizabeth was accusing her of something. They drank, and Valencia shook her head and looked outside the window and saw an older man, dressed normally, carrying on and talking to himself like a schizophrenic.

  She looked back at Elizabeth. “It’s horrible,” she said. For a moment Redgrave came into her mind; she saw his face, and in her mind all the veins in his face became blue and visible and she could see a road map running across his cheeks and forehead and chin. “Horrible,” she said, again, shaking her head.

  The waiter came, and they ordered their steaks.

  Six days later, on a Tuesday, Elizabeth Carlyle and her team appeared with their opposing counsel in court. Both sides submitted motions whereby the Calcott Corporation and Emerson Trust Bank withdrew their lawsuits against each other. There would be no trial. Judge Sandoval seemed satisfied.

  The story was picked up immediately. “Toxic Case Comes to an End,” read the Times’s headline.

  Inside his office at Prexius Solar Solutions on Hudson Street, Jack Glasser, feeling something like a narcotic high, was reading the stories as fast as he could find them. He finished the first, then jumped to the next. “Mega Suit Ends, Wall Street Sighs in Relief.”

  When he was finished reading all the articles, he stood up from his desk and walked toward the door. The secretary, a woman named Luz, pretended not to see him and began typing on her computer. He knew she didn’t like him; it didn’t bother him in the slightest.

  You have no idea who I am, he said in his mind. I’m the most powerful man in New York.

  He went to the bathroom and peed a yellow stream into the urinal. In his mind, he practiced what he would say when the colonel called: “Yes sir, very good sir, thank you.”

  Everything had worked out fine. They had their money in Oman; they could arm their friends in Yemen. They could be a self-sufficient machine. No more begging Congress and the Pentagon for every tiny penny. Everything was good. The colonel would be happy.

  When he finished peeing, he went to the sink and looked at his face in the mirror. You are fifty-one years old, he told himself. You need to wear sunscreen. Then his mind shifted, and he remembered a chore that needed doing.

  He had to pick up Charlie’s new hockey skates. Fuck, he thought. Fucking Helen, it’s called Amazon, you can order things online now. He left the bathroom and headed for the elevator. He’d celebrate today’s victory with a cappuccino and a chocolate chip cookie.

  When the elevator came, it smelled like cigarettes. On his way out of the lobby, he raised his hand in a peace sign to the doorman. Getting coffee, I’ll be back, he said to himself.

  The doorman, a black guy with dreadlocks, said, “All right then.”

  It was cooler outside than he expected, and he regretted not bringing his coat. The traffic, headed for New Jersey, had already started; and a flurry of honking began a block away and spread toward him. Glasser jammed his hands into his pants pockets, walked north, and rehearsed how he’d order from the coffee girl: Gimme a single cappuccino. A single cap. Single cap. Hey, just a single cappuccino, please.

  Because of the honking, he didn’t hear the footsteps coming up behind him until th
e very last second. In the reflection of the building’s window, he saw a skinny man in a motorcycle helmet limping toward him.

  He didn’t have time to turn. His mind sensed what was coming, though, and it screamed accordingly. He didn’t hear a gunshot, but he felt the air around him change. He saw the ground—gray and dirty—and a flash of light. His head snapped forward like he’d been punched and his feet felt yanked back. The ground came rushing up to meet him and knocked the air out of his chest and hurt his chin and jaw.

  Then there seemed to be a long moment where he was lying on the ground and trying to run but nothing was happening. He could see people’s feet and the sky, and the clouds above him were gray and white, and his chin hurt and his head felt cracked open and the screaming in his head became a low kind of humming.

  There had been some kind of great mistake.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I’d like to thank my agent, Charlotte Sheedy. As always, I lack sufficient words to express how thankful I am to her. She’s simply the best!

  This book was edited by Patricia Mulcahy and Morgan Entrekin. I’d like to thank both of them for their insight and wisdom. Additionally, I’d like to thank Briony Everroad, Sara Vitale, and all the wonderful people at Grove Atlantic.

  Walter Greene designed the cover. What a guy!

  Ryan Gattis, Jason Schwartz, and Ezra Feinberg were all early readers and provided invaluable feedback.

  Joshua Dubin recommended me for a private investigation job that led directly to this book. That’s all I can say about that.

  Rebecca Young, Emma Freudenberger, Haeya Yim, and Jenny Ma answered my endless questions about lawyers and the law.

  Chris Brown and Rodney Faraon fielded my spy questions. I am very thankful to them.

  Benjamin Roberts and Dave Hoffman answered my questions about banks and finance.

  Reyhan Harmanci, to whom the book is dedicated, did everything including urging me early on to change Valencia’s gender from male to female. Yes, I’ll admit it. But that was just one of a million things. Thank you!!! Love you!!!

  I lost some very dear friends and family during the writing of this book. RIP Nicky B. RIP Christine Poldino. RIP Noelle Tenedou-Levine. And RIP to my mom, Kathy Coyne.