by Matthew Iden
Continuing, I came to the edge of the Quarters at 8th Street south of the freeway. No double white line demarcated one neighborhood from the other—I could just tell from the amount of life, traffic, and noise on the other side of the street that I was leaving the project. I was turning around to head back to my car, no further ahead on the case than when I’d arrived, when I caught a peek of a storefront on the farthest edge of the development, nearly straddling the two neighborhoods, one live, one dead.
Battered Pepsi and neon lotto signs told me this was one of the catch-all convenience stores you can still find in a few places in DC, selling everything from Budweiser to Black Flag. There were bars on the windows and its faded white vinyl siding gave it a kind of sad parity with the neighborhood I was walking through. Two old black men sat at a metal bistro table on the sidewalk in front of the store, watching traffic go by. Based on their stares, I must’ve been the first living thing to walk the streets of the Quarters in a while.
I took my time and sauntered their way, not wanting to look like I was making a beeline for them. They watched me every step. All the way until I was standing in front of them, in fact. I nodded a greeting, they nodded back, and I went past them into the store.
The inside was dimly lit by two overhead fluorescent lights missing several bulbs. Low shelves offered two or three of everything, like I’d guessed, and a refrigerator unit along the back wall—humming to itself—held sodas, juice, and a selection of malt beverages of dubious taste and quality. Handwritten signs told me that I’d have to talk to Herbie if I wanted cigarettes or lottery tickets. A calendar from a local insurance company, stuck on June 1997, hung on the wall by the door. Neither Herbie nor anyone else appeared to be in the store. I went back outside.
“Either of you know where Herbie is?” I asked the two guys.
The one nearest me, dressed in dark blue jeans and a green short-sleeved shirt, scrunched his mouth and shook his head. He had a wispy white mustache and goatee. The other man shook his head, almost sadly. He wore a battered fedora, thick glasses, and a worn beige suit thin at the knees.
“You know when he’ll be back?”
Shaking of heads. I looked back and forth. “Does Herbie work here?”
The guy with the hat shook his head a third time.
“Not anymore or not today?”
The one with the goatee said, “Herbie dead.”
“Well…shit,” I said.
Goatee guy kept talking as if I hadn’t spoken. His voice was hoarse, like he’d been shouting for a week. “He and Miss Tammy were carrying on, but Tammy’s man George found out. He up and cut Herbie at the Fourth of July barbeque.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen seventy-eight.”
Hat-and-Glasses said, “Herbie make a sound something awful, going huh, huh, huh, trying to hold himself together.”
“Made like to get to the hospital,” Goatee said, “but he ain’t never had a chance.”
They both wagged their heads at old Herbie’s predicament. A dump truck barreled past, hitting its air brakes and drowning out all sound. I waited for the noise to fade. “So, who runs the store now that Herbie’s gone?”
“James,” Hat-and-Glasses said.
“Okay, when will James be back?”
“I’m James,” Goatee said.
Jesus Christ. I rubbed a hand along my jaw. “How you doing, James. You live here?”
“Yep.”
“All your life?”
“Not yet,” he said and laughed with a sound like sheet metal being cut. He held out a palm and Hat-and-Glasses gave him five.
I gave them a second to yuck it up. “What I mean to say is that I guess you’ve been around the Quarters awhile.”
“Damn straight,” he said, then reached to the ground and took a pull from a Coke can. A small flask sat next to it and he reached down, unscrewed the cap, and poured from the flask into the can with a practiced hand, then put them both back on the ground. The burnt-vanilla smell of bourbon wafted to me a second later.
“I thought you said you was done offering any money for the store,” the hat guy said to me, pushing his glasses higher on his nose and looking at me meaningfully.
“What?”
“You said you wasn’t going to buy out James here.”
“I might’ve driven past here once or twice,” I said, mentally tacking on in a squad car, “but I haven’t been in the Quarters for a decade or more.”
“He ain’t the man, you dumbass,” James said to his friend, then turned to me. “Dennis can’t see but five feet away.”
“Some other guy was here, offering to buy your store?”
“No,” James said, reaching for the Coke can again. “Offering to not buy my store.”
“How does that work?” I asked. Talking to these two was making me dizzy.
“When that company bought the school, anybody who was still here packed up and left,” Dennis said. “Quarters was already dead, half the folk gone.”
“But you held on?” I asked James.
He shrugged. “I live over the store, thought maybe they would come offer me some money for the place. Saw the man walking by, handing out vouchers for the other folk. Told me I didn’t qualify.”
“Vouchers?”
“To get yo’self a new house in ten years,” Dennis said, laughing. “In case you come into a million dollars in the meantime.”
I looked back at James. “And what’d you say to the man?”
“I said, you damn right I qualify. The whole neighborhood’s gone. Who am I supposed to sell goods to? This place a ghost town. Huh? Who am I gonna sell to?”
“Dennis?” I suggested.
He snorted. “Dennis don’t buy shit.”
“But the man didn’t agree?”
“He get annoyed and say, man, we don’t have to buy your place. Once everybody vacates, you gonna go broke and leave, too.”
“Die on the vine,” Dennis said in a singsong voice. “Die on the vine.”
“When did all this happen?”
“A year ago, maybe more.”
“They haven’t done much with the place,” I said.
Dennis laughed again. “That’s ’cause of Miss Tonya.”
“Who’s she?”
“Miss Tonya live in the Quarters damn near her whole life,” James said. “Told the man she ain’t leaving. He could build around her, he want, but she gonna sue their ass if they drop so much as a nail on her yard. Said she didn’t need their damn money, she had someone looking out for her.”
“She held out, then?”
“She try,” Dennis said, looking sad.
“Did she take the money?”
“Not Miss Tonya,” Dennis said. “She die. Four, five months ago.”
“People start to leave for real, then,” James said. “With Miss Tonya gone, ain’t nobody else with the heart to fight.”
I felt a tingle start around the base of my skull. “How’d she die?”
They both shrugged. “Heart attack, I guess,” James said. “Her heart ain’t no good.”
“What was her last name?”
“Jackson.”
I made a mental note. “The guy, the one who walked around handing out vouchers. You know who he was? Ever see him again?”
James said, “He around a few more times, trying to tell people to hurry and get out. Gave me a bunch of his cards, told me it would be worth my while, I convince anybody to sell. This before he told me to go fly a motherfucking kite.”
“Got any of those cards left?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I threw ’em all out. Pissed me off.”
My heart sank, but Dennis dug around in his wallet, then said, “Here you go,” and reached across the table holding a card.
“What you carrying that for?” James demanded.
“Thought he might change his mind,” Dennis said. “You always angry, James. The
man might come back, offer you fifty large for the store, but you don’t have his number, ’cause you tossed all his cards.”
“He ain’t coming back,” James said, and the two launched into what sounded like an old argument. I didn’t hear the rest of it, because I was staring at the cheap, print-it-yourself business card in my hand, feeling the tingle all over now. Spelled out in a blocky, sans serif font on the card was a name.
Patrick Zimmerman.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Finding Zimmerman’s place hadn’t been easy. The card had just three pieces of information on it: his name, the simple occupational title of Broker, and a phone number. I could’ve tried my hand at another Internet search, but I went one better. I called Dods and offered to scratch backs.
“Hey, Junior,” I said when he answered.
“What’s going on, Marty?”
I gave him the abbreviated version of my exchange with James and Dennis, and the discovery of Pat Zimmerman’s card.
“So, this Zimmerman shows up in two places,” he said, sounding slow, but I wasn’t fooled. “He’s all over Wendy Gerson’s day planner like a hot date and also happens to make an appearance at the site of a huge development she’s helped put together.”
“Right.”
“So you want a reverse lookup on the number, go stake him out?”
“That would be a nice start.”
“And you keep me in the loop if it turns out he did Gerson or Montero.”
“Naturally.”
“You think he did it?”
“I have no clue, Dods,” I said. “I don’t even know what the guy looks like. He could be a hundred and three years old. Or in a wheelchair.”
“You never got a good look at the guy you were chasing,” he pointed out. “So he could be anybody, anyway. I could be the guy.”
“It’s definitely not you.”
“Yeah? Why not?”
“Because you’re shaped like a doughnut, Dods,” I said. “Though, I got to say, you’re not missing anything in the middle.”
“Har, har.”
“The guy I followed was slim, fast. I’m not in bad shape, but I could barely keep him in sight.”
“So what’re you going to do to ID him? Ask him to run away from you?”
“Jesus. Are you going to help me or not?”
He chuckled. “Hold on.”
I heard him put down the phone and I smiled. Busting on Dods and getting busted on by him felt comfortable, almost like the old days. All without the shitty hours and lousy work. Not a bad trade. A few minutes passed, then I heard a clatter as he scrambled for the phone.
“Zimmerman’s last known good is 1203 Ordway Street, Northwest.”
“That’s in Cleveland Park, right?” I asked.
“Yep. You want me to give you directions? It’s west of the zoo, which is a big park where they keep all these animals—”
“Your childhood home, you mean? The ape house?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You going to do a full stakeout?”
“I’m not really built for that anymore,” I said. “I want to take my time, observe the situation.”
“Low and slow, huh, Marty?”
“Running into traffic with a bag on my head hasn’t produced the best results,” I said. “A smidge of discretion may go a long way here.”
Cleveland Park was a fun little corner of DC, with a more pleasant, stately vibe to it than most neighborhoods in the capital. It was a favorite of young professionals and staid bureaucrats alike, chock-full of modest brick apartment buildings and affluent Federal- and neo-Colonial-style homes. I cruised up and down the shaded back streets until I found Ordway. Zimmerman’s address wasn’t a house, it was the English basement apartment of a midrange, ivy-covered townhome sporting a rich garden of zinnias in the front. Despite the pleasant neighborhood ambiance, however, bars on the basement and first-floor bay windows told me I was still in the city.
Armed once again with Dods’s whiz-bang digital camera, I found a spot that gave me decent sight lines to the short flight of basement stairs that led to the apartment. The townhome was west of Connecticut Avenue, a main north-south drag that held the shops, restaurants, and Cleveland Park Metro stop. I’d oriented the car towards all of that, betting Zimmerman would be coming from that direction at the end of the day. If he did, I’d have plenty of opportunities for head-on shots with the camera before he got to his apartment steps. How would I know it was Zimmerman walking towards me? I wouldn’t, but Dods had assured me the new-fangled camera could hold just under a bazillion pictures, so I was free to take a hundred snaps of every human that walked down the street until I knew I had Zimmerman.
While I waited for my target to appear, I put in a quick call to Channing Faraday. I dove into my questions before he could grouse too much.
“In the context of big corporate real estate deals, what’s a broker?”
“Nothing special,” he said. “It’s a broad title without much specific weight behind it. Anybody can call themselves a broker.”
“What do they do?”
“Some are sophisticates that discreetly put deals together for old money without too much leaking to the press. But most are bottom-feeders, trying to find the next big deal before it breaks. They’re the eyes—and the hands and the feet—of the big firms that put the pricey deals together.”
“They get a commission?”
“Yeah.”
“How do they find the deals?”
“They trawl neighborhoods in transition, watch the news for industrial bankruptcies, try to cobble together different pieces that don’t occur to other developers. Like a dockyard, a warehouse district, and a manufacturing plant being turned into a new office park with an ice-skating rink in the middle.”
“Do they ever buy into the plot themselves? Like, before the developer or investors get interested?”
He thought about it, humming to himself. “Doubtful. Too much personal risk. Maybe if a firm would walk away from a whole mega-deal if there was one missing link, but probably not even then.”
I watched the street. A young girl in a blue dress and pumps was walking my way. Good thing the card had said Patrick and not just Pat or I’d be arrested for taking pictures of every woman walking down Ordway. “Would a broker attempt to…influence…the sellers to seal a deal?”
“I’ve never heard of it being done, but I’m sure it goes on all the time.”
“Stick or carrot?”
“Like, do this deal or I’ll burn your house down?”
“Or give you a thousand dollars for signing away a house that the city’s going to knock down anyway.”
He snorted. “Both. Either. Whatever it takes to get the deal, Singer. A couple of points on a multimillion-dollar deal will make people do desperate things.”
I thanked him and hung up. Faraday’s description fit with what Zimmerman had been doing in the Quarters, according to James and Dennis. Encouraging some folks to leave, promising a voucher for a return at a later date. Offering a bounty to residents who talked others into going. Telling James his business was going to dry up, so why not leave anyway, before things got really lousy?
Various scenarios where the broker of the deal murdered one of the lead transaction attorneys on the deal still didn’t make a lot of sense, however. There were possibilities, of course. Gerson might’ve backed out on the commission, or given the deal to another broker, or something else I couldn’t imagine. More information would help.
I sighed and settled deeper into my seat. Stakeouts had always been my least favorite part of detective work. Nobody liked them, but at least some cops had a way of zoning out without actually falling asleep. I started taking pictures of random things just to pass the time, taking Dods at his word that the gizmo in my hands could hold more pictures than I could actually take in an afternoon. A woman approaching my car from behind shot me a curious look as she passed, however, so I
cooled it and put the camera on the seat before I got busted by the local beat.
At 5:20—before my back started to ache, but after my butt had gone numb—the foot traffic on Ordway started to increase. It was a mix of young go-getters and old government hands, sharp-looking attorneys with sharklike smiles and ground-down bureaucrats, everyone outfitted in the latest professional garb in a wide array of colors—as long as that color was gray, black, or blue. They came in waves, bunched and released by the dictates of the Metro line.
Besides their attire, they had one thing in common. None of them turned down the path towards Zimmerman’s apartment. Each stomped past the spot with the same blank look on their face, came down the sidewalk and past my car, then beyond and out of sight. By 7:10, the waves had slowed to a trickle and I was getting bored and frustrated although, as stakeouts go, I hadn’t even gotten out of the gate. I’d been on plenty that had needed multiple twelve-hour shifts to produce something worthwhile. But I wasn’t building a case that could stick in court; I was looking to put together some answers by whatever means I deemed necessary. I kind of liked the change. Except my ass was numb now, just like a stakeout in the old days.
So when three more peds came down Ordway, I decided to take a chance. There was a tall, thin, balding guy with glasses followed by a short, thin guy around the same age, but with sandy hair touched with gray. A younger guy with tousled blond hair brought up the rear. Like the earlier commuters, the three had the requisite uniform of black or blue suit and trench coat thrown over the arm and had given the guy in front of him a healthy lead of twenty feet or so. It was the considerate thing to do in the city.
My bet was on the tall, bald guy. I pulled out my phone, the card Dennis had given me, and punched in the number. It rang twice. I smiled as the tall guy slipped a hand in his breast pocket and pulled out his phone. Gotcha. My smile faded as he put the phone to his ear and began talking…while my line rang three and four more times.
A young voice answered, “Hello?”
My eyes flicked down the line. The young guy with the messy hair had his phone out as he was walking. I glanced back at the tall, thin man. He was still talking, but it wasn’t to me.
