The Man Who Came Uptown

by George Pelecanos

  The dogs got up and walked around the boys in a circling-the-wagons move. Then Whitey, as she tended to do, sat down with her body leaned against Sydney’s leg, always her protector.

  “Bang-bang,” said Vic, pistoling his hand and pointing it at his father.

  “Victor,” said Sydney. “You know what we say about guns.”

  “Yeah, Vic,” said Ornazian, without conviction. He had a trigger-locked .38 in the nightstand by his bed, registered and legal due to his CCW, the license to carry in the District. He also owned a pump-action Remington, not legal, which he kept unloaded and leaning against the wall of his closet behind his hanging shirts. He hoped to never use either of them. But if anyone entered his home and came up to the second floor, where his family slept, he would.

  The entrance of the kids and the excitation of the dogs told Ornazian that he wouldn’t be getting any meaningful work done. His cell phone, set behind his laptop, lit up with a message. Sydney read the message over his shoulder without guilt. It was from a woman named Monique. The message was wordless and consisted only of two symbols: a dollar sign and a question mark.

  “One of your whores?” said Sydney.

  “She’d probably prefer that you call her an escort.”

  “What’s a whore, Dad?” said Gregg.

  “A lady who works very hard.”

  “Like Mum?”

  Ornazian pocketed his cell and stood up. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Aren’t you going to answer your son?” said Sydney.

  He kissed her mouth. “Gonna be out for the rest of the day. I’ll stay in touch.”

  ON MONIQUE’S old Backpage listing, recently taken down, her photos showed her mostly from the rear, bending over a bed, displaying her ample behind in a thong, or in obstructed profile, pinching the elongated nipples of her breasts. Listed along with her measurements was a menu of her services, vaguely but cleverly described; the ad noted that she was available for out-call dates and that she accepted tips. She had a nice face, if one was not turned off by large features, so she was not hiding her grille out of shame or for deception but rather to conceal her identity. In addition to working as a prostitute, Monique had a straight job. She was one of the nice-looking, put-together women who worked the makeup counters at the high-end department stores clustered on Wisconsin Avenue in Friendship Heights. There were others like her in those same kinds of positions, living two lives.

  Ornazian and Monique were seated at the bar of Matisse, a French restaurant on Wisconsin and Fessenden that was a quiet, refined spot for locals. Monique was having a glass of dry white wine. Ornazian stuck with water. He had passed her an envelope containing one thousand dollars in cash soon after they arrived.

  “You made me ask for it,” said Monique.

  “I wasn’t holding out on you. I’ve been busy.”

  “How’d Theodore take it?”

  “Like a man. But he talked too much.”

  “Sounds like him. His silver tongue is forked, but that’s how he gets his women.”

  “You know Theodore means ‘God’s gift,’” said Ornazian. “It’s from the Greek.”

  “Hmph,” said Monique.

  Monique was wearing all black, the uniform for her day job, and she was perfectly made up, befitting her job as a specialist. She was on her lunch break and not far from the store. Ornazian asked her how it was going for her since the government had pressured Backpage to remove its escort listings.

  “I’m up on another site,” said Monique. “Ain’t no thing to me. Always gonna be a market for what I do and a way for men to find me.”

  “You still working the clubs?”

  “VIP rooms only,” she said. “Everything’s cool.”

  She had started as a dancer in the topless club on New York Avenue, near the dog shelter, which had once been the most bumping spot of its kind in D.C. She was out-call exclusively now, and she had no pimp. In her world, she had moved way up.

  “I might have something for you,” said Monique. “Could be good.”

  “Talk about it.”

  “Girl I work with up at the makeup counter? Beautiful girl, goes by Lourdes? Used to work the houses but got herself out. She got a friend named Marisol who’s in a brothel in Columbia Heights, near a bar owned by this dude Gustav.”

  “You saying Gustav owns the brothel too.”

  “Right.”

  “What’s the story with Marisol?”

  “She was trafficked. Got sold to a recruiter in Guatemala and then smuggled into America, same trail they use for guns and drugs. She working off her debt now in that brothel in Columbia Heights.”

  “And?”

  “I told my friend Lourdes about you. Not by name, understand. And she told her girl Marisol. Marisol wants to speak to you. This dude Gustav is a real entrepreneur. Owns a house-painting business and a little jewelry store in Langley Park. Lourdes say it’s one of those stores that never seems to have a customer in it.”

  “So Gustav is laundering cash through his other businesses.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is it okay if I contact Marisol?”

  “She’ll contact you. I’ll give her your number if that’s cool.”

  “It is.”

  “And if this pans out, there’s something in it for me, right?”

  “Something. Not a grand, though.”

  “You’ll take care of me, Phil.” Monique checked her watch and drained her wineglass. “You always been a gentleman.”

  ORNAZIAN SAT in his Edge in the neighborhood of Deanwood in Far Northeast, where brick apartment buildings mingled with houses in varying conditions on large lots. Deanwood’s residents were urban in appearance but the atmosphere had a southern, country vibe. There were smokers and barbecue grills out in the yards, and men worked on their own cars here. Deanwood folks had been keeping chickens long before it became a suburban trend, and one man owned a goat. Ornazian was on the high ground, on Jay Street and Forty-Seventh. The hilly terrain with its view of the federal city was typical of D.C.’s eastern quadrants.

  He was waiting for Christopher Perry, an attendee at the Weitzman party, to come back from school. Woodson High’s day had ended a half an hour earlier and Ornazian was hoping to catch Perry as he arrived at his house, half of a ramshackle duplex that stood at the top of the hill. Ornazian knew a Woodson math teacher who had once been in a band, which was not an unusual progression for the Positive Force crowd. After assurances that Ornazian was not going to jam the kid up, the teacher had given him the name of the street on which Perry stayed, but he stopped short of giving him an address. A real property tax database search confirmed that a house on Jay Street was owned by a Debra Perry, Christopher’s mother or grandmother.

  Ornazian was about to give up and hit the ignition button when Christopher Perry appeared, walking east on Jay with a book bag slung over his shoulder. His face was an approximate match to the photo that appeared on his Facebook page. Ornazian got out of his car and crossed the street. Perry, a big kid, eyed him mildly and without concern and kept walking. Ornazian was obviously off his turf. Deanwood and its adjacent neighborhood Burrville had yet to gentrify.

  “Christopher Perry?” said Ornazian.

  “Yeah?” Perry stopped walking and dropped his book bag, freeing his arms. It was what Ornazian would have done.

  Ornazian had drawn his wallet and opened it to show Perry his license. “Phil Ornazian. I’m an investigator.”

  Unlike many who accepted the deliberately vague title of investigator, Perry studied the license before Ornazian closed his wallet.

  “You’re not MPD,” said Perry.

  “Private.”

  “So I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “Let me ask you one question,” said Ornazian. “You went to a party in Potomac, Maryland, recently.”

  “So?”

  “The house got robbed of some valuable jewelry that night. A girl was sexually assaulted.”

  This cau
ght his attention. He looked a bit surprised.

  “You had a question?” said Perry.

  “You know anything about that?” said Ornazian. “You were there with a friend, right?”

  “Me and my boy had nothing to do with it.”

  “I didn’t say you did. I’m just wondering if you saw anything. I’m working for the man who owns the house.”

  Perry shrugged. “We just went out there for fun. See if we could talk to some girls. Trust me, I wouldn’t do it again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Those people were acting stupid. Rich kids all trying to be like Gucci Mane and shit, sippin that Drank.”

  “You don’t use it?”

  “Nah, I don’t mess with it. It’ll do you permanent. Pimp C died behind it. Thing was, the kids at that party was actin more fucked up than they was.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The dudes who brought the Lean, the ones who was sellin it? They were runnin a game.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Three older white dudes, inked up. The guy I was with—”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Nah. Uh-uh.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “My friend looked at one of the prescription bottles they brought in with them,” said Perry. “They had taken a needle and syringed out some of the medicine. Probably replaced it with NyQuil or some shit like that.”

  “So they were cutting it. How do you know?”

  “There was a burn mark on the bottle, where they had sealed the hole back up with fire. We know what that’s about. But those kids out there in that fancy neighborhood don’t know shit.”

  “Were these older guys the same ones who trashed the house?”

  “Tellin you, I don’t know. Me and my boy, we left out of there early.”

  “Why?”

  “Those guys who brought the Lean were mean-muggin us. Calling us lawn jockeys and shit like that. Didn’t care if we heard it either.”

  Ornazian considered that. It fit the profile, given what he had seen carved into the table at the Weitzman home.

  “So you ghosted.”

  “We were outnumbered. Besides, I wanted to get back to a party I knew about in Northeast. Hang with my own.”

  Ornazian thought of his sons and what they would be facing in the world as they came of age. For a moment, he considered making an apology to Christopher Perry, even knowing how lame and ineffective it would be. But Perry had already picked up his book bag and was walking toward his home.

  Twelve

  THE DISTRICT Line kitchen, in the basement, was not much bigger than the cooking area in most homes. It was L-shaped, and at the elbow of the L was a wood-fired oven where all of the prep and cooking was done. There was no grill. Beside the brick-faced oven was a steel rack holding split logs. Two separate stations, one for colds and salads, one for pizza toppings, were set up on each leg of the L, with refrigeration beneath the work boards. Beer and white wine were stored in a refrigerated walk-in, and there was shelving for canned goods and an area for kegs whose tap lines ran through the basement ceiling to the bar above. It was a crowded but efficiently organized space.

  In another open space, around the corner from the kitchen’s L, was the small station where Michael Hudson did his job. It too was very narrow and consisted of an automatic dishwasher and two stainless-steel basins with a power-spray nozzle and hose suspended above them. Mounted on the wall were chemical housing units with plastic tubing that automatically dispensed cleaning agents and nonspotting drying fluids to the dishwasher. The silverware, plates, and glassware went into the machine. The basins were used for the soaking and manual scrubbing of pots and pans.

  When Michael was working at his station he stood grounded on rubber mats and wore an apron. To his left was an iron spiral staircase that led to the dining room. Food runners had to negotiate it, as did he when he delivered the racks of glassware to the bar. The steps were textured like manhole covers to minimize slippage. A person had to be careful and in fairly good shape to work here.

  In the morning before opening and whenever else it was necessary, he went outside, split the logs of kiln-dried oak, brought bundles into the kitchen, and stacked them by the oven. The kitchen workers constantly fed the wood into the oven, which ran up to eight hundred degrees. They used long-handled peels to get pizzas, calzones, and roasted veggies in and out of the oven. Their inner forearms were frequently marked with burns.

  Michael had figured out everything his first morning on the job. Didn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to learn how to wash dishes, and that was the disappointing thing, at first. There was nothing really to look forward to; it was strange to realize that he wasn’t going to have any more knowledge a year from now than he had acquired that very first day. But it was a paying job, and it was the routine he needed in his life.

  The ladies in the kitchen, Maria and Blanca, were hardworking, devout Catholics and friendly to him despite the language barrier. He was cracking that pretty quickly too. He used mucho, caliente, rapido, para qué, and gracias, señora and sometimes señorita if he was being innocently flattering. They called him Miguel and “baby,” and he called them mamacita and “mommy.” They were in their twenties, had children, and already looked middle-aged, but they had light in their eyes and in their smiles.

  The men who worked the kitchen were less friendly but not aggressively so. Maybe they had been tight with the man whom Michael had replaced. Befriending them would take more time. But Michael had made headway there too. One of the men, Joe, would greet Michael in a boxer’s stance and throw soft combinations at him as he passed. That was his idea of an olive branch. They called Michael el hombre alto. He towered over all of them.

  On day and night shifts, the kitchen workers played their Spanish music through a Bluetooth speaker set up near the colds station. To Michael it sounded like he was at a party or a carnival all the time. After a day he tired of it and began to use earbuds to listen to his own stuff, a little go-go and hip-hop but mainly the R & B he had heard his mother play while he was growing up in her house. He could have listened to novels that way too, but he found he didn’t care for the experience. He didn’t read e-books either. To him, a book was like a painting that hung in a museum. It was like a piece of art. There was nothing that compared to holding a book in his hands and scanning the words on the page. It made him “see” what he was reading. It was how he dreamed.

  So he brought a book with him to work every day. Read it at lunch up in the empty dining room on the third floor or sitting at one of the picnic tables on the patio if it was nice outside. Sometimes Angelos Valis would join him, just for a few minutes, not to bother him but to ask him how things were going.

  “Why they call this place the District Line?” said Michael. “We’re five, six miles away from Mer’land.”

  “The owner’s father remembers a column called the District Line that ran every day in the Washington Post. A guy named Bill Gold wrote it.”

  “When dinosaurs roamed the earth.”

  “There’s another local restaurant with the same name, in a hotel. They don’t bother us about it.”

  “Y’all should change the name.”

  “What would you name this place if you had the chance?”

  “Michael Hudson’s.”

  “Of course.” Angelos smiled. “I’ll see if I can get the sign changed today.”

  At the end of those conversations, Michael always thanked Angelos for the opportunity he had given him. He meant it too.

  SINCE HIS interview with Christopher Perry, Phil Ornazian had attempted to reach out to several of the kids who’d attended the Weitzman party, with little response. Most of them had ignored the messages he’d sent through Facebook, and those who had hit him back told him they had no interest in speaking with him. Finally, a girl named Britany, a friend of Lisa’s, said that she’d meet with him somewhere that was not her home.

  He got up with Britany
after school one day at the food court in Montgomery Mall. He bought her some food at Cava, a fast-casual Mediterranean spot, and as she ate, he asked her questions. She claimed she didn’t know who had robbed the Weitzman home or who had assaulted Lisa. Her eyes and body language told Ornazian that these assertions were lies. He found her both dishonest and vacuous and wondered why she was here beyond a free lunch. But when she easily gave up the name of a boy who had been at the party, along with his home address, Ornazian realized why she’d agreed to speak with him. Britany wanted to point him toward someone with whom she had had a relationship that was now a personal beef. From the way she talked about him, he could sense that she was angry at the kid and was also still into him. He was a boy who’d done her wrong.

  His name was Billy Hanrahan. He went to a private school in Potomac, which was good for Ornazian. She said that Billy had recognized one of the older guys who’d crashed the party. So the meeting with Britany, which had seemed worthless at first, had turned up gold.

  As Britany finished off her meal, Ornazian got a text from Marisol, the woman who worked at the brothel in Columbia Heights. She would see him but had only a small window in which to do so, and it was now.

  “I’ve got to go,” said Ornazian.

  “Don’t give me up,” said Britany.

  Ornazian left her there and drove back into town.

  MARISOL HAD texted him a photo, so Ornazian knew who he was looking for, and he found her seated alone at Compass Coffee on Seventh Street, in Shaw. She was an attractive girl in her early twenties, wearing an inexpensive, low-cut dress beneath a spring coat. Her eyes were almond-shaped and very dark, as were her eyebrows. He surmised her hair was naturally black, but today it was reddish from a rinse. She had the features of a native Guatemalan.

  After he introduced himself, he bought them two coffees, returned to the wood-laminate table, and sat down. She was nervous as a cat, looking around and out the plate-glass window that fronted the store. He spoke softly in an attempt to put her at ease.