by Andrew Case
Peralta reached into her belt and took out a utility knife. She knelt by the bright orange cable and started to saw at it. She was worried that the metal on metal would send a shock once she was through the orange casing, but it sliced through the cord quickly and simply. The cable cut, Peralta stood in the hallway and waited.
Behind the door on her right there was a sudden commotion. Chairs being turned over, maybe. Dishes headed to the floor. Peralta stood facing the door so she’d be ready. Whoever was about to open it would not be happy.
The door flung open to a very small man, maybe in his early seventies. He couldn’t have been much over five feet, thin, and he wore reading glasses. He had a full head of white hair clipped tight, standing out against his dark skin. His nose and ears seemed too large, or maybe as he had aged, the rest of his features had simply receded. Before he said anything, Peralta spoke.
“I’m here about the man in the air shaft.”
He saw the badge. He saw the knife, still in her hand. She could see fear wash over him in an instant. “I didn’t see anything.”
“He fell three days ago. Someone saw it. Someone called 911.”
“You came here to cut off my power? I take oxygen.”
“I came here to talk about the man in the air shaft. There’s a hardware store on Flatbush, and I’ll buy you another cable. You didn’t see him fall, but you heard the ambulance come. You saw the commotion.”
“I was in my room. I’m in my room most days. I didn’t hear anything before the ambulance. I looked out my window and I saw them take him away.”
“Anyone see him come in? Anyone see who he was talking to? What was his business in the building?”
“I need my oxygen to get working again.”
Maybe he was in trouble. Maybe he did need his oxygen. But maybe, too, that was a little leverage. “You got a super in this building? You got a landlord?”
“Look around you. Landlord never comes by except to turn things off. There’s no super. We do the best we can. I didn’t have heat all last winter. If you want to go find people to lock up, why not start with our landlord?”
“I’ll get you that extension cord.” But then something else occurred to Detective Peralta. Every building is like a neighborhood. And every neighborhood has its neighborhood watch. Whether it is a leafy street in Nutley or a slum in Flatbush, there is always someone who is the eyes and ears. “But before I do, can you help me? Is there someone in this building who will know? Someone who always knows what’s going on? When you want to know something about what is happening, who do you talk to?”
“You want to see Evangeline.”
Fifteen minutes later, sending the man back upstairs with his extension cord, Detective Peralta was accepting a cup of tea from a plump woman in a bright dress. The apartment was spotless: the tablecloth edges were folded neatly, the counters were scrubbed, and the windows had been freshly cleaned from both sides somehow. In a place so prim, Detective Peralta could forget about the violations in the building, the man without his oxygen, the pile of cigarette butts and needles in the bottom of the air shaft.
“I called emergency afterward. I could see out the back window he was hurt. I wasn’t about to go poke my nose out and see what happened. We have professionals for that.”
“Did you see him come in?”
“I heard him come in. You can hear everything here. I heard them both come in.”
“Both?”
Evangeline lifted her mug of tea to her lips and smiled. Peralta reached for her memo book. She was going to have to start taking notes.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Each time her company had grown—from a pet project run out of a conference room in her father’s church, to an apartment in a building she sold six months after she bought it, to the top floor of a glass tower in the new downtown—Eleanor Hill had thought that she could delegate the paper. But it never worked. Every time she did a new deal, there was always paper. And each time, somehow, she had to walk through it herself. She had thought that leases could be signed by subordinates. She had hoped that wire transfers could replace handing off checks. Pretty soon all she would need to do, she had imagined, was scout buildings, give a thumbs-up, and collect the money.
And yet here she was, on a Sunday night, in her office, with stacks and stacks of paper to look over. Not just look over. Read. There would always be paper, and never enough people to hand it over to. A big building means hundreds of apartments. And the language in every lease might be the same, but someone has to read through it, even just once. Eleanor had lawyers draft it for her, but she knew she’d have to read the final copy herself. In the end, you can never really trust anyone. Plus the permit applications. The talking points the lobbyist was going to use. Her own presentation to give to the community board and the City Council. Owning her own development firm didn’t feel like being the boss of anything at all. It felt like being a high school English teacher, grading everyone else’s papers while they were at home drinking beer and watching the game.
She felt as though she was always working while everyone else got the credit and the money. Her father most of all. He’d never turned down a check from her, that’s for sure. But he let her know, with all the subtlety of that morning’s sermon, just what he thought of her. He was a good man, an honest man, and a pillar of the city. But there was no pleasing him. You try to impress your parents, but whatever choice you make is the wrong one. If you make it financially, they wish you had been a social worker. If you tend to the sick, they will be put off that you never made any money. And heaven forbid you become an artist.
Eleanor had a brother who had moved to Los Angeles to be an actor. The profession her father had first loved. Twice a year they heard that he would be playing a drug dealer on a cop show or a gunshot victim on a hospital show. So twice a year there was something that Eleanor knew her father would not be caught dead watching. It was easier, knowing that there really was no pleasing the man. She turned back to the lease, puzzling over what the difference was when the lawyer used the word “shall” instead of “will.”
There was a ding in the hallway. The elevator. Maybe her father had come by to apologize. Or maybe the community board had come in on its knees to beg her to build the apartments. Or maybe her brother had just won an Oscar, and was coming to show it to her. A girl can dream.
She looked up from the leases, ready for just about anything. Through the glass hallway, silhouetted by the newly lit skyline, she saw a thin man in a cheap suit, bringing back a stack of brochures. She leaned back in her chair and smiled.
“How did it go, Leonard?”
Leonard Mitchell seemed worn out. He had started out a little bit worn out. But a day showing a gut renovation project to Brooklyn buyers could suck the life out of anyone. The buyers were demanding and ignorant. They would ask for a hard number on the costs to fix up the house. And they wouldn’t know a contractor, barely could tell you two brands of dishwashers, and weren’t even really sure what they wanted the place to look like when they were done. Plus, the house that Leonard had shown that afternoon had its own unique challenge.
Leonard staggered into her office and sat in the comfortable chair across her desk. Last time, he had looked as though he was trying to hold himself up. This time he fell right into it.
“You told me there was a tenant. You didn’t tell me she would be there.”
“Margaret was there?”
“Is that her name?”
“You didn’t ask her name?”
“She told me that if we showed the house she would cry and she would wail and she would tell people she would fight them in court if they tried to evict her. And she did that. People walked through the first two stories and then got upstairs and ran out of the house like they’d been shot at.”
“Did they, now?”
Leonard was growing excited. “And she had a little boy with her, and he was crying too.”
“Sammy. The boy is named Sammy.”
“Well, Sammy has a set of lungs on him.”
Eleanor set down the lease. She reached to another pile. Picked up another stack of paper. “Margaret is a very smart woman, and she’s in a bind. She’s doing what she needs to do. In the end she knows she’ll have to go. She figures she can hold off eviction for a year, eighteen months. And she knows exactly what eighteen months is worth to a buyer looking to redo the house. So when she gets her number, she’ll leave.”
“It’s not an act, Eleanor. She is really being kicked out.”
“She is really being kicked out. But it is also an act. Why was she able to sit and tell you calmly what she was going to do if she was so distraught? She knows exactly what game she’s playing. And she’s good at it. That’s why I’m not redoing the house myself. She’s going to get her number, and whatever her number is, it isn’t worth it to me.”
“So that’s what we do around here? We kick people out of their homes? Figure out what they can be bribed with and drop the hammer?”
“If it makes you feel bad you can go talk to the original seller. He could have kept on running a low-rent apartment building for the rest of his life. He was making more than he was paying. But pretty soon the building would get assessed higher. And his property taxes would go up. And he’s watching up and down the street and seeing how much he can sell for. So you can blame him if you want to find someone who isn’t charitable. Or blame the city. They drove down crime and now people with more money want to come and live in neighborhoods they didn’t want to live in before. Or blame the people moving in. They could stay in Manhattan or Wichita or Seattle if they wanted to. But if I hadn’t bought the house, someone else would have. And I’m only selling it because it doesn’t work out for me to kick out Margaret personally. And I’m not in the business of holding on to property while the price drops. Or trying to play the next crash. No one wants to catch a falling knife. I am in the slow and steady game. Ever upward. Just a little bit at a time.”
Leonard picked up the papers and straightened himself out.
“No one wants to catch what?”
“This business is boom and bust, Leonard. I’ve lived in Brooklyn all my life and I have seen my share of booms, but I have seen bubbles pop too. And when a bubble pops, everyone is hoping to get in at the bottom. To buy low and be ready for the next boom.” She took out a pencil and tossed it in the air. “A dropping price is like a falling knife. If you get it by the handle, if you find the bottom, great.” Her hand snapped onto the pencil, a sharp confident thwack. “But if you are too early, or too late, and you buy in the middle of the fall, you’re left holding the knife the wrong way. In fact, it’s more like it’s holding you.”
“Okay. Well, I don’t know what you were sending me out there for anyway. It seemed like a waste.”
“Not at all.” Eleanor took the stack of paper from across her desk. “We got six offers on that house this afternoon. People are willing to take the leap. People think they can handle Margaret. God bless them. You did a good job.”
The man looked a little stunned. He reached across the desk and took the stack of papers. They had come in by fax. Another antiquity roaming around her office. She worked in an industry where people still sent faxes.
“You need to write those up,” Eleanor said. “There is a form on the system. And you made a sign-in at the open house? Put them in the database. It’s busywork for now. But I trust you’ll be able to handle bigger things. You can take the office at the end of the hall. Your credentials are printed out. On the paper on the desk.”
Leonard stood up and straightened the stack of papers. He mumbled something and walked down the hallway toward his new office. Eleanor smiled. She was comfortable with this one. She had been burnt once before, by someone she had been unable to control. Who had turned on her. This guy was soft, maybe already broken by his last job or the stint upstate, or just too eager for the money to do anything but serve. She wouldn’t have anything to worry about from him at all.
She sighed deeply and went back to her paperwork, red pen in hand. A teacher’s work is never done.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Leonard could tell from the smell that the DIMAC offices had not changed a bit. The carpet runs were still patched with electrical tape. The walls were still smudged with decades-old handprints. And there was still that smell: some rough combination of sweat, blood, and fear. Leonard hadn’t been to his old workplace, the Department to Investigate Misconduct and Corruption, in well over a year. Since then, the mayor had installed an outsider to run the agency. Barry Schaeffer wore a shock of white hair and bespoke suits; he didn’t care what the other city bureaucrats thought of him because he could always fall back on his private-sector fortune if he needed.
Schaeffer had gotten to work issuing press releases crowing over every arrest that DIMAC made. Cops who faked their overtime or firefighters who pulled family jewels out of the ashes and put them up on eBay. But Leonard had followed the cases and seen that they weren’t going to trial. The evidence was always a little thin, or hadn’t been obtained by the book. The investigations were pure show now; quick and shoddy and made for the cameras instead of a jury. In Leonard’s day, they caught just as many miscreants. But they had closed their cases tight and won at trial. Other than the press releases, not much had really changed. As Leonard could attest by the smell.
It was going to be a quick visit. Leonard had some paperwork to collect; he would dash in, dash out, and get back to Mulino in an hour or so. There was plenty to tell the detective after the night he had spent at Hill and Associates. It took Leonard only half an hour to enter the data on the offers that came in on the townhouse and to add the sign-in sheet to the database. Six offers. Four of them were from other developers, two were from people planning to buy the place and rehab it themselves.
The individual buyers were probably out of luck. They thought they would be able to cope with Margaret and Sammy. They thought they would begin an eviction proceeding, or buy her out, or make her life miserable enough to make her want to move. But they didn’t know how to do the first, they didn’t know how much the second would cost, and they didn’t have the money for the third. It was why Eleanor was unloading the house, after all. She knew the woman’s name. She knew the son’s name. She had probably been dealing with them for six months and figured it was time for them to be some other developer’s problem.
Which happened more often than Leonard would guess. Because after he entered the buyers’ information in the database, he started combing through the digital files of Hill and Associates. And the information showed that Eleanor Hill had sold off a number of properties just as they were on their way to becoming sour.
He had been worried, scrolling through company transactions that weren’t strictly part of his job assignment. But minimal security meant they probably weren’t tracing where Leonard was going either. Even if someone found out what he had been looking at, he had a ready excuse. He was an eager new employee, after all, just trying to familiarize himself with the business.
He had gone through most of the documentation surrounding fifteen transactions. While Hill and Associates did put up its share of buildings, what it mainly did was buy property from one developer and sell to another. One parcel Leonard tracked had been sold five times, each time for up to half a million dollars more than the last. One company bought and sold it twice within three years. It had finally been bought by a Chinese public pension fund, run by a consortium of investors in Singapore. Leonard looked up the parcel itself on a map and had seen that it was still raw dirt. It was that way on all of the deals—Hill and Associates would buy land, sell it to another developer, that one would sell it to a third, and finally a foreign hedge fund or multinational investment platform would buy it. And no one would buy it from them.
The developers were getting rich off of a game of hot potato speculation. It wasn’t even clear to Leonard that Hill and Associates was making much money off the properties wher
e it actually built anything. In those buildings, there were bills to pay: raw materials, labor costs, payments to workers’ comp, insurance, and hordes of intermediaries delivering wiring and pipe and appliances and glass. In the end, a couple of the condo buildings had sold for big gains, but most broke about even. A few more seemed to be in the red. The real money was in driving up the price of land and then leaving it in the hands of people in another country who had heard the words “Brooklyn Real Estate” and thought they were getting a steal at any price.
Whatever holding company laid out the big bucks on the final deal thought the value of whatever plot it had bought would double every few years, just as it had for the last few years. Maybe it wasn’t worried that it couldn’t sell the land now. It could always sell it later for more. Or so everyone thought. To catch a falling knife indeed, Leonard thought. Maybe it wasn’t a swindle exactly, and maybe the Eastern European conglomerate wouldn’t really notice that it had paid twenty-two million for land that really was worth closer to eight. But it was the kind of scheme where you could make an enemy.
And if Hill and Associates was making enemies, that gave Leonard a couple of theories about Wade Valiant. Maybe Valiant had found out what was going on and was demanding a cut to keep from telling the dupes. Maybe someone who had been left holding the bag thought that causing industrial accidents was a good way to get back at Eleanor Hill, and Valiant just happened to be in the way. If you crossed someone in Uzbekistan, there was no telling exactly how he might take it out on you.
Leonard had made a list of the buyers that were last in line. Some of them might not even know that they had overpaid yet. He would take the list to Mulino this afternoon. Digging up information on the companies themselves was NYPD business. They would be able to run databases and search visa records and maybe that would get them somewhere.
But until then, Leonard had to keep up his cover. Which meant that he had to pretend he was going to Hill and Associates to work, on the up and up. And to do that he would have to collect his pension papers from all the city agencies where he’d ever worked. He’d already been by the Parks Department that morning. His commissioner wasn’t thrilled with him leaving after less than a year on the job and pulling out of city service just after hitting his twenty, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. And Leonard couldn’t exactly tell him the truth.
