by Matthew Iden
I turned, wrenched the door open, and went to find Julie Atwater.
Chapter Nine
Julie was throwing things into a large handbag when I got to the office. Her motions were jerky, almost spastic, as she tried to grab her things and, I assume, run out of the office—and away from me—as fast as she could.
I stood in the doorway, watching her. Now that I’d followed her back here, I had no idea why I’d done it, or what I was supposed to do. I cleared my throat. “Julie.”
She ignored me, continuing to stuff pencils, notebooks, and other office products into her handbag blindly, grabbing anything she could off the desk.
“You going to put Amanda’s laptop in there, too?”
She stopped. Without turning around, she said, “What do you want?”
I did this too often, running into situations without thinking about the consequences beforehand. I cleared my throat again. “I have no idea. I saw you standing there. Following you seemed like a better idea than not following.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” Ah, you’re a silver-tongued devil, Marty Singer.
She turned to face me fully. There was a furrow of anger down the bridge of her nose. “Why not? Why not? Because you made it abundantly clear the last time I saw you that you wanted nothing to do with me. When you told me to get out of your life? Remember?”
I swallowed. It wasn’t a great memory. “I remember.”
She threw up her hands. “Then what is there to talk about?”
I ignored the question. “Why are you here?”
She turned back to her bag. “The same reason you are, I imagine. Amanda needed help, asked me, and I said yes.”
“What do you do for them?”
She sighed and turned around again. “What do you think, Marty? I’m an attorney. I give them legal advice when they need it and do pro bono work for them when a husband or a disgruntled boyfriend threatens to sue.”
I digested that. “Okay.”
She crossed her arms. “And what are you doing here?”
This felt like solid ground, but ground that was further away from what we should’ve been talking about. “Amanda asked me to check the office out and talk to Diane about security ever since Karla’s boyfriend busted in and broke Amanda’s arm.”
“So I guess you’ll be here more often?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know. I’m not doing the security personally, but I’ve offered to give Diane some tips and pointers. And see if I can run this guy down and let him know he’s not wanted.”
“Good. I hope you find him. In the meantime, let Diane know when you’re coming in and I’ll make sure I won’t be here.”
“Wait…” I was confused. This had gone too quickly and we hadn’t talked about the right things.
She waited. “Yes?”
“Nothing, I guess,” I said. “I just thought we might be able to…talk.”
“To…talk?” she said, mimicking me.
I frowned. “Something wrong with sitting down and chewing some of this over?”
“Because we happened to bump into each other, completely by accident? You were so interested in reviving our relationship that you waited until fate brought us together?” She shook her head. “No, Marty. You did plenty of talking last time. I got the message. And I think I’m better off for it.”
With that, she grabbed her bag, slung it over a shoulder, and brushed by me on her way out. Her heels made a clapping sound as she stomped down the hall.
Amanda found me five minutes later, still standing there. “Didn’t go over too well?”
I shook myself. “It didn’t go.”
She sighed and sat down behind her desk. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Marty. With all the craziness of Karla’s boyfriend breaking in and going to the hospital and going over security for the building, I forgot Julie was working today.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“Honest,” she said, raising her right hand.
“Okay.” I sighed. “It was just a shock for both of us, I guess.”
Amanda fiddled with a paperclip on her desk. “She was mad?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You felt strongly about what she did,” she said tentatively. “And you let her know it.”
“I know. I did.”
“Something change since then?”
I sank into a chair and put my feet on her desk, pinching the bridge of my nose to relieve the pressure building there. “Time’s passed. I’ve gotten some perspective. It was tough when it all happened. I’ve never been involved with anyone that had a direct effect on my work or, frankly, on my life.”
“You’ve been married,” she pointed out.
“Sherry had nothing to do with my work life. In fact, she and I both did everything possible to keep her shielded from it.”
“Maybe that was part of the problem.”
“Maybe. The more I sank into being a cop, the less she understood about me.” I made a face. “Anyway, that’s ancient news. I think Julie got under my skin because, back when I was saving you, she was right there, in the middle of things. After I found out she knew a hell of a lot more than she’d let on, I lost it. She’d betrayed a trust.”
“And now?”
I shrugged. “I think about it once in a while. From her point of view.”
“And?”
“I wonder, what was she supposed to do? Spill her guts? Confess all? Where would that have gotten her?” I thought about it before going on. “I would’ve raked her over the coals and that’s no incentive to open up. She went with the safest option, which was to do what she could to help me catch the lunatic going after you, and let sleeping dogs lie. Is that such a crime?”
We were quiet after my little soliloquy, each with our own unhappy thoughts of the time, just a year ago, when Amanda and Julie both had been attacked by a man intent on re-creating the murder of Amanda’s mother. Amanda hadn’t come away unscathed, but she had at least turned her experience into positive energy. She’d been interested in women’s rights before the stalking, but it wasn’t until after we’d put the bad guy away that she’d actively sought work at a shelter. Other things had intruded in my life and taken the emotional time and space I might’ve used to think about Julie. Now I realized a small part of my head and heart had been thinking about her the whole time.
She traced imaginary circles on her desktop. “Maybe it’s worth telling Julie that. Trying again.”
I sighed and scrubbed my face with my hands. “I don’t know. Maybe you just get one shot at some things.”
Chapter Ten
Tartikoff and Brentwood sounded to me like two street corners in an old immigrant neighborhood. Or a steakhouse where the bar was made of dark wood and brass and they sold the beer in imperial pints. Or a folk duo from the sixties, clad in oversized fisherman’s sweaters and staring off into the distance on their faded, sepia-toned debut album cover.
This Tartikoff and Brentwood, however, was none of the above. It was DC’s leading real estate legal firm and Wendy Gerson’s former employer.
The office was downtown in the Golden Triangle, the vibrant business district in the center of DC. The office buildings rising around me sported glass, concrete, and steel on the outside, subdued geometric patterns and monolithic integrity on the inside. With their soaring atriums and uniformed desk guards they were doing their best to look like they’d been transplanted from New York or Chicago, but since no building in the District was allowed to rise higher than the Washington Monument, the effect was muted, as if they’d all been chopped in half before making it to DC. Which was okay with me—short buildings meant more sunlight, even in the long shadows of a mid-Atlantic autumn. I’d take any kind of perkiness I could get.
The inhabitants of the Golden Triangle didn’t seem to notice. Smart-looking men and women walked with purpose along the sidewalk, chatting on phones or walking three abreast with
colleagues from the office. They weren’t so different from the fast-talking lobbyists my city was famous for, but the métier of their overheard conversations seemed to be more about stocks, takeovers, company R & D, and other things that were more directly related to commerce. Then again, they said that Washington lobbyists were some of the wealthiest professionals in the country, and a lot of those same topics could be coming up for a vote in Congress. I glanced at a corner sign to make sure I hadn’t wandered onto K Street by mistake.
Tartikoff and Brentwood was in the Streir building, which I knew from the four-foot-high steel letters announcing the building’s name bolted to its wall. It had the same fortresslike exterior as the buildings around it, though it was lightened by an incongruous row of waist-high, concrete flower planters in front of the building. The planters interrupted the flow of foot traffic on the sidewalk and, while the marigolds and pansies in the planters were cute—a welcome visual break in the gray and black around me—the toothed steel ridge running along the lip put the lie to it, since the teeth were there to discourage the homeless from sitting or lying down on the planters’ edges. Look. Enjoy. But not too much. No doubt the flowers had tiny alarms on them.
I walked up to the Streir and pushed the button. I wasn’t wearing the regulation black trench coat and charcoal suit of the other men around me, but the front desk guard beeped me through the door and into the marble-and-brass lobby anyway. Apparently chinos, a blue dress shirt, and a navy blazer passed the test. Maybe I was a C-level executive coming in on his day off, unable to resist the lure of the workplace. I couldn’t imagine that kind of mindset, but I could pretend.
I signed in at the front desk. “What floor do I need for Tartikoff and Brentwood, please?”
The woman behind the desk looked up from a magazine. “Which office?”
“Tartikoff and Brentwood.”
“I heard you, honey. They own ten floors here. Which department are you going to?”
Oh. I looked down at the name Paul Gerson had given me. “Alex Montero?”
She nodded. “Acquisitions. Ninth floor. Check in with the desk there. They’ll take you to Mr. Montero’s office.”
I did the things she told me and, fifteen minutes later, found myself in a nice lobby, sitting on a leather couch, sipping coffee. Beverages were served in blue mugs that said Tartikoff and Brentwood in a strong, manly font next to a logo of a New World explorer peering through a looking glass into the yet-to-be-discovered distance. The coffee was good and the couch was comfortable, so I didn’t mind the wait. And Alex Montero’s office assistant was a young woman in a business suit stretched tight in just the right places, which made the wait all the more pleasant.
Until the third cup of coffee. I’d called ahead—or, rather, Paul Gerson had—so my visit couldn’t be a surprise and the reason for it had to be clear. It made me wonder if I wasn’t being stonewalled. It also made me question the influence of the precious Gerson family reputation Paul had wanted so badly to protect.
But that was speculation. Right now, I needed to make sure this trip hadn’t been a waste and only Alex Montero could do that for me. Not so long ago, when I actually had some clout, I could knock on the door, flash my badge, and get my questions answered before my coffee got cold. These days, the only thing I could flash was a library card. I walked up to the assistant’s desk, smiling and gesturing apologetically at my watch.
“I know Mr. Montero is a busy man, but I’ve got an appointment at two o’clock with a reporter friend of mine who’s covering Wendy Gerson’s murder for the Post. They’re doing a multi-issue exposé on the tragedy and they’re asking for an interview. I’d hate to be late for it. Do you think Mr. Montero’s going to be free anytime soon?”
She asked me to wait a minute, then went into the man’s office, shutting the door behind her. I went back to the coffee station, filled my cup a fourth time. I didn’t bother to sit. I was betting there’d be no need.
I’d just finished putting in the creamer when the door opened again and the assistant came out, followed by a harried-looking man in his forties. He had black hair swept straight back, a dark complexion, and black eyes. He was dressed in a suit minus the jacket, displaying a crisp white shirt and red tie with suspenders.
“Mr. Singer?” he called from the office door, then turned around and went back inside without bothering to see if I’d followed.
I smiled my thanks at the assistant and went inside. The office was everything I thought it would be. A wide wooden desk the size of a barn door held a laptop and stacks of papers scattered across its surface. Side tables, chairs, and a couch were pushed into the corners. A bookcase with the clichéd leather-bound legal tomes covered one wall. The view behind the desk was wonderful, another case of where DC office buildings weren’t like New York’s, since the same ninth-floor view in Manhattan would be of the window across the street. Here, I could see the tops of the buildings in Rosslyn—unfettered by our silly rule about competing with the Monument—across the river in Virginia. The way his desk was situated, however, Montero’s back was turned to the view he’d no doubt worked very hard to earn.
The man in question was behind his desk, checking his phone. I sat down in one of the chairs and waited. I thought it was fascinating that Montero preferred to check his email, or so I assumed, on his phone when his laptop was sitting right in front of him.
Eventually, he ran out of things to type or read and put his phone down. “Okay,” he said, as if I’d only just walked in. “You’re Singer?”
“Yep.”
“Paul Gerson asked me to give you a few minutes.”
“Yes, very kind of you,” I said. “So, Wendy Gerson?”
He nodded. “What about her?”
“For starters, she’s dead,” I said.
“Yeah?”
I waited a beat, then said, “I see her death has had a big impact on you.”
He threw his hands up. “We liked her. I mean, I liked her. She was a hard worker, very tough. Shame about her getting killed. But life goes on, you know?”
“Not for her,” I said. “You understand I’ve been hired by the family to look into her death?”
“Yeah.” Montero nodded several times in a row, rapid-fire. I’d just had four cups of coffee and didn’t look this jacked.
“I just wanted to get that out in the open,” I said. “Some of the questions I’ll be asking might seem impertinent or prying, but it’s really just to get some background on her life.”
He thought about it, hesitating. Weighing pros and cons. Then nod, nod, nod. “Okay.”
“First, what does your firm do and how did Wendy fit into it?”
He smiled, a flash of the teeth, suddenly comfortable again. This was stuff he knew. “Tartikoff and Brentwood is the transaction counsel for about sixty percent of the corporate real estate deals in the District.”
“And what’s a transaction counsel?”
“We’re the local team that helps put together the real estate deals that are brokered by white-shoe firms from out of town.”
“White-shoe firms?”
“Big fish. Old Yankees.”
I stared at him blankly.
“Do you know how a commercial real estate deal gets made?” he asked.
“Not as such,” I said.
“Okay, shit,” he said. He leaned forward, his chair squeaking, and made his hands into an imaginary box. “Look. A number of entities—investment firms, corporations formed for the purpose, individuals with a ton of cash—want to invest in real estate. Kind of like how you might invest in a condo in Florida. You put ten thousand down, flip it, and walk away with your initial investment plus ten or twenty grand. These guys have millions to throw around, hoping to make tens of millions.”
“Same deal, just an order of magnitude bigger,” I said to show I understood, though I thought of FirstStep, and how their lack of funds meant they had to choose between having beds or having
security.
“Right. But when you’re talking that kind of money, you don’t get a doofus real estate agent out of the phone book, you get a big firm, one of the old New York or Boston groups that have been around since the Revolution.”
“Ah,” I said. “Patrician, Ivy League, yuppie. White shoes.”
“Exactly.”
“And they look out for the investors’ interests and make sure they don’t get ripped off.”
Nod, nod, nod. “Right. The investors don’t know squat, they just have money. So, the white shoes look around for a great investment. They see something in DC—it’s always been insulated from downturns in the market because of the Fed—and they want to put their money into it.”
I pulled out a notebook and a pen. “Like how big are we talking?”
He blew out a breath and shrugged extravagantly. “How big can something be? A mall, an industrial park, a stadium?”
“Why don’t the white shoes just handle the whole thing? They have to be paying you a bundle to be involved.”
“Because they don’t know the situation on the ground like we do,” he said, spreading his hands. “Most of the attorneys at a transaction firm like T and B are from right here, or at least went to law school here. They definitely pulled all of their professional time in DC.”
“So they know the permitting process, the inspections needed, the offices and officials that’ll be a pain to work with.”
“Right, right. The white shoes are investing client funds into real estate in DC, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai. They don’t have the time to learn every ordinance for each city they invest in, you know? We earn our money by quarterbacking the deal at the local level.”
“You subcontract, in short?”
“Yeah.”
“So where did Wendy Gerson fit into all of this?”
Montero leaned over and poked a button on his phone, checked the screen, then leaned back. “Hmm? Oh, Wendy was one of our transaction attorneys. One of the best. JD from Georgetown, did great work for the firm here and came up through the ranks. DC raised and bred, so she knew it perfectly. Smart as a whip, too.”
