The Man Who Came Uptown

by George Pelecanos

  “In retrospect,” said Weitzman, “I wish we hadn’t left Lisa here alone that weekend. We’ve done it before, but that was when her older brother lived here.”

  “Richard’s away at Penn State,” said Diane.

  “She never gave us any reason to distrust her,” said Weitzman, who put up his hands as if in surrender. “She never did anything like this.”

  That you know of, thought Ornazian. He had read up on Weitzman, who was a highly compensated chief counsel complete with stock options for a large tech company on the I-270 corridor. Weitzman might have been in denial about his daughter, or perhaps he was simply being defensive about his absence on the weekend in question, but he was a man in his fifties who had raised two teenagers, and he couldn’t have been naive.

  Leonard Weitzman was an average-size man with the normal weight issues of the middle-aged. He probably went to the gym regularly, but he was losing the fight. His scalp was visible through his thinning hair. At seven in the evening, he was still wearing work clothes, and they were expensive. An Armani tie, Gucci horse-bit loafers, a fine-fabric suit. Ornazian guessed he favored the Saks men’s store over Nordstrom and that a clothier with a Brit accent picked out Weitzman’s threads in advance of his visit. Ornazian was projecting, but some version of that scenario had to be true.

  His wife, Diane, short and sturdy, was put together nicely. Her clothing was up to the minute and her hair was stylishly cut. She had all the looks and upkeep that money could buy, but tonight the blur of alcohol and undisguised stress was in her eyes.

  “Tell me how the party got noticed,” said Ornazian.

  “Lisa announced it on Facebook,” said Weitzman. “It could have spread there or it could have been a situation where, you know, people hear about it and start calling their friends. In my day, a party got around by word of mouth.”

  “Is Lisa still on social media?”

  “She’s using her laptop. She’s smart enough to know not to do anything like that ever again.”

  “And she still has her phone.”

  “I’m not going to take her phone away from her. We wouldn’t be able to reach her.”

  Ornazian picked up his pen. “I’m going to need the names of some of Lisa’s close friends. People who were at the party who you know wouldn’t have participated in the destruction or the theft.”

  Weitzman made eye contact with his wife and then looked back at Ornazian. “That’s going to be tricky,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I described the events of that night in detail to the attorney you work for. I assume Mr. Mirapaul relayed all of it to you.”

  “He told me what he knew.”

  “Then you know that Lisa was assaulted that night. You must also know how delicate the situation is. Do you have children, Mr. Ornazian?”

  “I do. The complexity of this isn’t lost on me. But I’m also wondering why you didn’t call the police.”

  “Lisa insisted we keep this quiet. She didn’t want this to blow up any more than it already has. She’s only a sophomore. She has to deal with the kids in her high school for two and a half more years.”

  “So you didn’t notify the police about the robbery either.”

  “No.”

  “Weren’t you concerned about Lisa’s health?”

  “We took her to our family gynecologist. There was some bruising but no permanent damage.”

  “You mean no physical damage.”

  “That’s right.” A touch of indignation had flared up in Weitzman’s voice. “Can we move on?”

  Ornazian nodded. He was pushing Weitzman’s buttons for no good reason, and he told himself to stop. He suspected that Weitzman’s desire to sweep his daughter’s assault under the rug was as much about his own reputation as it was about hers. With regard to the matter at hand, that was neither here nor there. Ornazian needed the job.

  “Do you have a list of the stolen items?” said Ornazian.

  Weitzman pushed a manila folder across the table. Ornazian opened the file. The top sheet was a printed list itemizing the goods taken from the house the night of the party, along with their estimated worth. Naturally, Ornazian wondered if the figures were inflated.

  “Are these goods insured?” said Ornazian, keeping his eyes on the paper.

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Insurance companies send out investigators in cases involving high-dollar losses. I’d like to know if someone else is out there trying to do the same thing I am.”

  “That’s not pertinent,” said Weitzman. The lawyer in him was coming out.

  Again, Ornazian made no rebuttal. He studied the list. The big ticket was the Tiffany bracelet. Its value was declared at fifty thousand dollars.

  “Do you have photographs of the items?” said Ornazian.

  “They’re also in the folder.”

  Ornazian slid the list back into the folder and put it beside his notebook. “So you have no idea who did this. And none of the kids who were here have come forward?”

  “We haven’t asked them,” said Weitzman. “That would involve the parents and, frankly, it’s a bridge I didn’t want to cross. There’s something else too.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Whoever did this to my house, to my daughter…these were very violent people. They cracked the granite countertop in the kitchen. They carved up my dining-room table with what had to be a very formidable knife. I don’t want any of this coming back on my family.”

  “Understood.”

  “I told Mr. Mirapaul about the purple drink that was all over the house, in those bottles…”

  “Promethazine and codeine. It’s typically mixed with Sprite or Mountain Dew. Cranked-up cough syrup, basically. Gets you all kinds of twisted. Lisa might have had some, but it’s not what knocked her out.”

  “I know. The doctors detected benzos in her blood.”

  Diane sighed audibly, shook her head, and went to the Sub-Zero for a refill on her chardonnay. She told them she was going upstairs, and they waited for her to do so.

  “Mr. Mirapaul said you could help me,” said Weitzman after his wife had left the room.

  “I work my cases hard if I take them,” said Ornazian.

  “What’s your fee?”

  “I’ll require a one-thousand-dollar nonrefundable retainer. Cash. On a job like this one, I take fifty percent of the value of any items recovered. If nothing is recovered, I get nothing.”

  “Why cash?”

  “I might have to break some eggs. This way, the trail won’t lead back to you.”

  “Your recovery percentage is steep.”

  “It is.”

  “The Tiffany bracelet was a twenty-fifth-anniversary present to Diane. It has a great deal of meaning for both of us.”

  “I’ll do my best to get it back. Do we have an agreement?”

  “Yes.”

  Ornazian picked up his notebook and the folder and got up out of his seat. “Do you mind if I look around?”

  “There’s not much to see. We cleaned up the house pretty well. The chairs they broke have gone out for repair. But let me show you something.”

  Ornazian followed Weitzman into the open kitchen. Weitzman pointed to an island with a cracked granite top. “I don’t even know how you could do this.” He made a head motion. “Come with me.”

  They walked into a dining room with walls painted a deep red. A table dominated the room. Several chairs were missing from the set. Weitzman pulled back the tablecloth to reveal a rich mahogany top badly damaged by deep carvings made with a heavy knife blade. Aside from random plow lines and the usual, unimaginative Fuck You, the number 14 was carved into the table. Ornazian was familiar with the number’s significance but made no comment. He used his phone to take photographs of the table.

  “May I speak with Lisa now?” said Ornazian.

  “She said she’d talk to you. I’m going to ask that you not discuss the assault with her.”

  “Agreed,” said Ornaz
ian.

  Weitzman produced his cell and speed-dialed his daughter.

  Nine

  LISA WEITZMAN, a thin girl with shoulder-length, expertly dyed blond hair, sat in a big cushioned chair on the family’s back deck, which was tricked out with an array of comfortable outdoor furniture and the requisite freestanding fire pit. Ornazian sat on a bench beside her, taking notes.

  Lisa wore jeans and a Canada Goose coat over a loose-fitting shirt. It was almost sixty degrees out and the down coat was not necessary today or often in Washington’s mostly moderate climate, but it was the current must-own label for status-conscious people, whether they needed the warmth it provided or not. Ornazian had once been in Bloomingdale’s in Chevy Chase and seen multiple customers wearing the jackets on a warm late-winter day.

  Lisa was smoking an American Spirit blue-label in full view of her father, who was still in the kitchen, pretending that he was not watching them. Smoking was probably now low on the list of parental concerns with regard to his daughter.

  “Tell me about the crowd that night,” said Ornazian. “Who you knew, who you didn’t know.”

  “It was a bunch of people from Churchill, originally,” said Lisa, naming her public high school. “Not all of them were my best friends, but they were people I knew.”

  “Some close friends there too?”

  “A couple.”

  “Do you think I could speak to them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are they girls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. What about the people you didn’t know? Can you describe them or name any of them?”

  “No, I can’t name them. I’m not holding anything back. I just don’t know their names.”

  “Describe them.”

  Lisa dragged on her cigarette and casually ashed her jeans. “These two guys came up from D.C. They told some of my friends that they went to Woodson, wherever that is.”

  “It’s a public high school in Northeast. Did they cause the trouble?”

  “They seemed all right. I don’t know. They found out about the party on Facebook, and I think they just came to try to talk to some white girls. The guys from my school were more intimidated by them than the girls were.”

  “You say you don’t know if they were all right.”

  “The night for me was split into two parts,” said Lisa. “The part I remember and the part that’s totally blacked out. It was like, I don’t know…”

  “You were drugged.”

  “The doctor said I was. So I didn’t see any of the bad stuff that happened. I didn’t see the house getting trashed or anyone stealing anything. That was toward the end of the night. I was out of it by then.”

  “Let’s go back to what you remember. Tell me more about the kids you didn’t know.”

  “Well, there were some guys from the private schools. They go to, like, Landon and Bullis. I’ve seen them around at Montgomery Mall and other parties. Most of them don’t live in this neighborhood. They’re from, like, Bethesda and maybe from the good parts of D.C.”

  “You don’t know their names either.”

  “No.”

  Ornazian couldn’t ascertain if Lisa was lying. Pressing her would probably shut her down. He was getting information that was helpful, so he kept the interview on the nonconfrontational track.

  He said, “Who else?”

  “There were these older guys who showed up.”

  “How much older?”

  “In their twenties?”

  “Did you know them?”

  “Never seen them before that night,” said Lisa. “They came in with the purple drink.”

  “Describe them.”

  “I don’t know. White guys, and all of them were kinda tall. They were pretty jacked. They had ink and one of them had that haircut. You know, the way the guys wear their hair in, like, Brooklyn and stuff? Kinda shaved on the sides and long on top?”

  “These older dudes brought the Lean?”

  “Yeah, they were carrying it in a cardboard case, like a case of beer. The bottles had labels on them, the kind you’d get at a pharmacy. They were selling it to the kids.”

  “So people were getting messed up on the drink. What else were they doing?”

  “Like, drugs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The usual. Smoking weed, drinking. Doing molly…”

  “Licking it off their fingers?”

  She shook her head. “Molly water. We mix a little in water now and drink it.”

  “Were you doing molly that night?”

  “No, I don’t like it. I smoked some tree and drank some Lean, and that’s it. I’m saying, I sipped some Drank and that’s the last thing I remember.”

  “Drank?”

  “It’s what we call it.”

  “I’m kidding you.”

  “Anyway. When I woke up, it was like four in the morning. Everyone was pretty much gone.”

  Ornazian had been writing but now he rested his pen. Lisa was smoking down her cigarette and looking away. Outwardly, she didn’t seem too damaged. She was putting on a game face. But he had her attention, and despite his promise to Weitzman, he had to ask.

  “Lisa, do you know who assaulted you?”

  “No.”

  “Was it the older guys who crashed the party?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your friends must know. Some of your friends must know who trashed your parents’ house and stole their valuables.”

  “They won’t talk to you. They don’t want to get involved. They don’t want their parents to know what they were doing.”

  “Don’t they want to help us find the guys who did this to you?”

  “Look, I’m sorry for what happened to the house,” said Lisa. “I’m sorry we got robbed. I really feel bad about what it did to my parents, and I told them so. But I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.”

  “Okay. Do me one favor. Friend me on Facebook. Help me out here. Give me a chance to retrieve your mom’s jewelry.”

  Lisa lit a fresh cigarette off the one that was burning down and then crushed the butt under her shoe. “Gimme your phone.”

  Ornazian opened the Facebook app on his iPhone, went to his home page, and handed the phone over to Lisa.

  “Put your contact information in there too,” said Ornazian.

  She produced her own cell and deftly executed the friend exchange, squinting against the smoke that was rising up off the cigarette dangling from her mouth. She then entered her contact info into Ornazian’s phone and handed it back to him.

  “I appreciate you talking to me,” said Ornazian. “I know it must be rough.”

  Lisa held out her pack of American Spirits to Ornazian. Ornazian waved the offer away.

  “You don’t want one?”

  “I gave it up a long time ago.”

  “These aren’t as bad for you as regular cigarettes.”

  “They’re all bad for you.”

  He stood up and shook her hand firmly. She seemed surprised by the adult gesture, and somewhat pleased.

  “Thank you,” said Ornazian. “If you remember anything else or if one of your friends wants to come forward…or if, you know, you just want to talk…give me a call.”

  “Please don’t bother my friends,” said Lisa.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, and he walked back toward the house.

  BY THE front door, Leonard Weitzman handed Ornazian an envelope containing one thousand dollars in cash. Ornazian slipped it into the manila folder containing the list of stolen items and the photographs.

  “How did you find Lisa?” said Weitzman.

  “She seems pretty strong.”

  “I don’t think anything like this will happen again. She made a big mistake putting this on Facebook. She knows it.”

  Ornazian knew that Facebook had become the social media platform for middle-aged users, the elderly, and others who were settled in life. Teenagers generally used more secure and secretive p
latforms to communicate. By using Facebook to announce the party, Lisa had wanted the news to get out to lurkers and strangers. She was being adventurous, but not devious. She couldn’t have anticipated what would happen that night.

  “Do you need anything else from me?” said Weitzman.

  “I’ve got enough to start.”

  “Ornazian…what is that, Middle Eastern?”

  “Near East. I’m of Armenian descent. My great-grandparents fled the genocide. The one the Turks claim didn’t happen.”

  “We have something in common,” said Weitzman. “My mother is a Holocaust survivor. She was a teenager in the camps. My father was army infantry. At the end of the war, he liberated her. I was the youngest of their four children. My mother is still alive. Now she has eight grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. It’s quite a story, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the American story.”

  “I have your contact information,” said Weitzman.

  “And I have yours,” said Ornazian. “I’ll stay in touch.”

  “Please respect our wishes,” said Weitzman. “Keep this as quiet as possible. Don’t involve the other kids or their parents.”

  “I won’t,” said Ornazian. But he already had a plan, and his assurance was a lie.

  Ten

  A WEEK after he’d come home, Michael Hudson decided it was time to see about a job. The lady from Open City Advocates had given him the name of a man who was the general manager of a restaurant in Columbia Heights. She’d told Michael, confidentially, that this man had a conviction from when he was younger, a possession/distribution thing that had bought him jail time in Maryland, and that he would probably be empathetic toward someone who was trying to get it together on the outside.

  Michael let Brandy out into the small dirt-and-weed yard at the back of their home and waited for the dog to do her business. The yard led to an alley and an empty lot, where another east–west alley came to a T. There Michael saw four men smoking weed, talking, not bothering anyone, not doing much at all. One of them, an army veteran named Woods, was seated on a crate. Michael nodded to Woods, whom he knew from childhood, and Woods said, “Hudson,” and another man said, “All right.”