One of Our Own

by Jane Haddam

  “That must have been expensive.”

  “Like I said, there’s a chance she could afford it. Oh, not that she had endless money, but that she’d managed to function. I think she may have been one of those people. Never got into debt, not even with a credit card. Never overspent. Put aside in savings every week of her working life and didn’t touch it until she retired and was careful about touching it then. So, housing court. Which makes what happened to Hernandez even stranger.”

  “Why?”

  “Because among the other judgments Marta Warkowski managed to get from the courts was a restraining order that said Hernandez couldn’t enter her apartment. Ever. Not even to make repairs. Hernandez was livid about the whole thing. He couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks. I can’t imagine that Marta asked him in that night. Which leaves us with how he ended up there, dead.”

  “Did you see the black van that night?” Gregor asked him. “The one the sisters are talking about?”

  “I didn’t see any black van at all. Not then and not later. If I had, I’d have thought what Sister Margaret Mary did. I’d have thought it was ICE. But I’ll tell you what I did see.”

  “What?”

  “Marta Warkowski,” Alvarez said. “She left church after the four o’clock at about four forty-five. She went back to her building. I saw her go. But just about five o’clock, I saw her come out again. I remember because it was really unusual. She mostly didn’t go out after dark, except for Mass, and then just because it’s dark by four thirty in the winter and she had no choice. But she went out that night and started off in that direction.”

  “Did you see her come back?”

  “No. I don’t know if you remember, but the weather was awful. I wasn’t hanging around outside any longer than I needed to. I never saw her again until her picture showed up in the paper after she was dumped on the street. I have been out to the hospital a couple of times. I may not really have known her, but I am her priest.”

  “I wonder where she went,” Gregor said.

  “So do I,” Alvarez said. “I wonder what Hernandez was doing in that apartment. It doesn’t seem possible that that man could be dead and that woman could be in a coma over an apartment in a barely habitable building, but here we are, and I don’t see anything else.”

  “I don’t see anything else either,” Gregor said.

  Then his cell phone began to buzz and vibrate in his pocket.

  PART THREE

  ONE

  1

  The man at the front at the Aldermine Cavern was holding a plain white envelope for Gregor behind the desk. He handed it over when Gregor presented himself. Then, when Gregor opened it, he took it back. Gregor had been able to feel the round hard metal of the Aldergold piece inside it. The man behind the desk took it out and put it down out of sight.

  “It’s just a formality, Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Mr. Alder was quite explicit about what we were to do with you. Why don’t you come along with me?”

  The Aldermine Cavern was not actually underground, but it was built to feel like it was. There were no windows that looked out on the street or any other scene of the outside. The walls were covered in dark green fabric that gave off the impression of moss. The floor was carpeted in brown. There were tiny white runner lights along the pathways that wound between the heavy wooden furniture. It could have been midnight or noon.

  The young man brought Gregor far into the room, then stopped at a deep, solid-mahogany booth in what might have been a back corner. Gregor couldn’t tell.

  The man in the booth looked up when Gregor arrived, but made no effort to stand. Gregor eased his way onto the bench on the other side of the booth table.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Cary Alder said.

  “Mr. Alder.”

  Cary Alder looked at the young man who was standing by, waiting patiently. “Maybe you should get Mr. Demarkian something to drink. Scotch, isn’t it? Some kind of unblended scotch would be good.”

  “Ginger ale,” Gregor said.

  “You must be joking. You’re not going to tell me you’re on duty. The police department isn’t actually employing you.”

  “The police department is employing me,” Gregor said, “but I’m playing hooky, or I wouldn’t have answered your text without bringing them with me. But I not only don’t drink in the daytime, I don’t want to. So if you want to get me something, ginger ale.”

  “You can’t tell it’s daytime in here.”

  “You can’t tell the world hasn’t ended in here.”

  “Get Mr. Demarkian a ginger ale,” Cary Alder said. “It’s a damned waste, but everything’s been a damned waste for days.”

  The young man murmured something unintelligible and disappeared. Cary Alder watched him go.

  “He’s gay, of course,” Alder said abruptly. “All the people we hire to work up front in Aldergold venues are gay. Gay men, that’s it. They’re impeccably groomed, they know how to dress, and if they don’t know how to behave when we get them it takes them a week to learn. Are you going to give me a lecture on what a bigot I am, stereotyping the hell out of people? Or are you going to have a fit that I’m operating against the law because I’m not an equal opportunity employer?”

  “I’m going to find out what it is you got me out here for,” Gregor said. “I do wonder if your employees know what your hiring policy is.”

  “Of course they do. They’re like everybody else. They like an advantage if they can get it. We don’t even bother to advertise openings anymore. The boys find me other boys. There are always more in the pipeline, so to speak.”

  Another young man showed up at the side of the booth. He had a tall glass of ginger ale on ice and a small square of linen napkin. He put them both down and disappeared.

  Cary Alder watched him go, too. Then he turned his attention to Gregor.

  “Let’s be real here,” he said. “This is something of a preemptive strike. I figure we’re in the midst of one of two scenarios. Either you found a pile of Aldergold pieces on Marta Warkowski when you brought her to the hospital. Then I’ve got to expect you to show up here, or my office, or God knows where, to ask about it. Or you didn’t find them, and there’s somebody out there holding on to them who will end up being my problem sooner rather than later.”

  “Because Aldergold can only be spent here,” Gregor said, “and nobody can get any unless you give it to them.”

  Cary Alder took a long pull at his drink. Gregor would be willing to bet it actually was scotch, middle of the afternoon or not.

  “Let’s not let this get out of hand,” Alder said. “For all the legends about Aldergold, it’s a very simple promotion based on a very simple premise. If you are an Alder Properties client in any of our high-end operations—gated communities out in Bucks County and on the Main Line, apartments in the two most expensive buildings we run in the city, a guest at our main resort in Palm Beach—we give you a few pieces of Aldergold on a regular schedule. You can use those to come in here, or in any of the other five venues we have that will only admit you if you have them. I don’t have to give them to you directly.”

  “And it’s that desirable, coming in here?”

  “It’s like the first-class VIP lounge at the airport,” Cary Alder said, “but more restrictive. Not everybody can get in here. It’s never crowded. You never have to wait for service. All the people you meet will be—like you. Or like you’d like to think you are.”

  “Rich.”

  “Rich, yes,” Alder said, “but a certain kind of rich. It’s the same principle here as it is with the neighborhood where Marta Warkowski lived. Still lives, I suppose. She’s not dead, last I heard.”

  “She’s not dead,” Gregor agreed.

  “People like to be with their own,” Alder said. “It’s a pile of crap, all that diversity stuff. People don’t want to live in the middle of a bunch of diversity. They want to live alongside people just like them, and they want to be able to police it, or to have somebody po
lice it. This is our place. These people are our own people. And don’t tell me rich people are more like that than poor people. It isn’t true. All people are exactly the same way.”

  “Are they? What about Atlantic City—you operate there, don’t you? Do you run Aldergold venues there?”

  “No,” Cary Alder said. “But that’s because I don’t run casinos. We do have buildings in Atlantic City, but they’re just standard issue middle-class and lower-middle-class apartment buildings. The kind of places you live if you’re dealing blackjack or tending bar.”

  “That seems a little odd,” Gregor admitted. “I’d think casinos were right up your alley.”

  “There’s no way to get into gambling without getting into trouble,” Cary Alder said. “Jersey. Las Vegas. It doesn’t matter. You always have to be mobbed up, and no sane person wants to deal with any of those people. And then there’s no guarantee you’re going to make any money.”

  “At gambling?”

  “At gambling,” Cary Alder said. “I know casinos are supposed to be a license to print money, but have you got any idea how many of them go belly up every year? Hell, the Mashantucket Pequots are practically making a hobby of it up in Connecticut. So, no. I don’t run casinos, and I don’t hand out Aldergold to gamblers. I like guys who work in the financial industry. Hedge funds. Stock brokerages. There’s more of that in Philadelphia than you’d think.”

  Gregor thought about Bennis and Bennis’s family. He was sure he had a pretty good idea of how much of that kind of thing was in Philadelphia.

  “I don’t think you got me out here to talk about who you give Aldergold to,” Gregor said. “Except for Marta Warkowski. And yes, we did find the Aldergold on her. Fifteen pieces. I’m told that’s quite a lot.”

  “Do you know about the building downtown, the one where we included fifteen units of affordable housing? We got a deal from the city on the land-use regulations. If we included the affordable housing, we got easements. And we needed the easements.”

  “If this is the place where the people in the affordable housing had to use a separate entrance in the back—”

  “That’s the one,” Cary Alder said. “I don’t know what the crap the mayor was expecting, but the kind of people who pay one and a half million for an apartment aren’t going to want to share a lobby with a bunch of file clerks. They’re not going to do it.”

  “And that has what to do with Marta Warkowski? She didn’t live in an expensive building. She lived in her old neighborhood.”

  “I know,” Cary Alder said, “but she was not your usual affordable-housing tenant. Not by a long shot. And everything connects. The affordable housing is our bread and butter, but the high-end housing is the serious money. And the kind of people who live in the high-end housing don’t like certain kinds of publicity. Which is where Marta came in. Marta was loud. She had money—not the kind of money to live in one of our high-end buildings, but enough to do what she wanted to do and operate the way she wanted to operate. She’d already taken us to housing court half a dozen times. She’d taken us to regular court twice. And now I’ve got this building going up, tens of millions of dollars already on the line, inspectors and bankers and everybody but the tooth fairy on my ass, and she was about to blow the whole thing up.”

  “Marta Warkowski,” Gregor said incredulously.

  “I’m going to have something to eat,” Cary Alder said. “I’ll have them bring a grazing spread. You should eat something.”

  2

  A grazing spread turned out to be the kind of food that made Gregor Demarkian a little nuts. It was food he ought to be familiar with—hummus, melitzanosalata, manti—that was rendered completely alien because it was made of … stuff. The hummus had cilantro in it. The melitzanosalata had sprigs of something sticking out of it. As for the manti—my God, Gregor asked himself, what could you possibly do to mess up manti? The kitchen at the Aldermine Cavern had managed something.

  There was also pita bread and feta cheese and three kinds of olives. These were fine, if not exactly what you would get at the Ararat. Gregor restricted himself to those. There was also a big tub of something that was vaguely pink and might have been made of red lentils. Gregor preferred not to ask.

  Cary Alder ate as if he were in a dream. He was not focused on the food. He was not focused on Gregor Demarkian. Gregor began to wonder if he had forgotten what they were doing here.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Marta Warkowski.”

  “Marta Warkowski,” Gregor agreed. “And maybe also Miguel Hernandez.”

  “Well, I can probably clear one thing up for you,” Alder said. “Marta probably didn’t shoot Hernandez. I don’t think the times would work out.”

  “You know something about the times?”

  Alder nodded. “She was down at our place the night of the, you know, the garbage bag.”

  “What?”

  “She came down to the office,” Alder said. “It was after five thirty. I was shocked to shit, to tell you the truth. There were a lot of things you could count on with Marta, and one of them was that she hated going out after dark. She didn’t trust the city. She didn’t trust her own block, which I don’t completely blame her for, because the guys on the street get aggressive. But she came down to the office that night, completely unannounced, and gave me what for.”

  “And it was after five thirty? And the office was open?”

  Cary Alder shook his head. “The girls in the rent office had already gone home. Even Meera had gone home. You’ve met Meera. She’s got that flu or whatever it is lately. She usually stays late, but she went home when the rest of them did, and she saw Marta on the street. Marta didn’t see her, from what I understand. It was right outside our building. Meera got home and called me. I came out into the reception area and I could see Marta past the frosted glass in the hall, pacing up and down. I nearly dropped dead.”

  “She was just pacing up and down? She didn’t knock?”

  “She knocked. She pounded. She yelled. Then she went back to pacing.”

  “So you let her in.”

  “Not at first,” Alder said. “First, I went back to my own office and called Hernandez and had a screaming fit, which I had every right to have. This is a long-standing situation. I’d gone out on a limb just to keep Hernandez in that job. I should have bounced his ass back to El Salvador.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because,” Alder said, “you may not believe it, but even a low-level building like that one takes a lot of work, and if the people you hire aren’t competent, they cost you. And Hernandez was very competent. He got the repairs done. He got the garbage picked up. He got the rents collected. He kept the furnace in order. And he was good at hiring people. The people he brought in could always do their jobs, and they were never drunks or drug addicts or other undesirables.”

  “Were they always here legally?”

  “They were always here legally enough,” Alder said. “You get that, don’t you? There are people who come here illegally who are total little shits. They’re perfectly safe unless they get arrested, which a lot of them do, because they’re not that bright. Then there are the kind of people Hernandez hired. They have forged papers out the wazoo. They work hard. They keep their noses clean. They raise families. They might as well be wearing neon signs that say ‘Deport Me.’ They just stick right out there where ICE can pick them up as soon as they get a traffic ticket.”

  “How did you know to call Hernandez about Marta Warkowski?”

  “It was a long-standing situation; I’ve told you before.” Cary Alder tried an olive. He didn’t seem to like it. “Her family’s been in that apartment since before Alder Properties owned the building. When we first bought the building, we wanted to break that apartment up into at least two smaller ones. That’s what we did with the other large apartments. The kind of people who rent in that neighborhood these days can’t really afford places that large, and they’re more than willing to crowd into
something smaller. So we make more money if we have more apartments, even if it’s the same square footage.”

  “But?”

  “But Marta didn’t want to go,” Cary Alder said, “and our usual … ah … procedures didn’t work. We raised the rent as far as we could. She paid anything we asked and then she went down to housing court and filed a complaint. It’s the two things together that killed us. If she’d filed the complaint but hadn’t paid the new rent, or only paid part of it, we’d have had grounds for an eviction suit. She never gave us any. So we had her investigated.”

  “You can’t tell me you thought she was a drug addict,” Gregor said. “I’ve seen her. Granted, it was while she was in a hospital bed—”

  “Listen, for a while there I was wondering if she wasn’t selling the stuff. She always had enough money. Always. And she didn’t have a credit rating. She didn’t have credit cards or anything to get a credit rating from. So I finally talked to some people with less than stellar reputations for obeying the law, and they looked into it.”

  “Her case manager at the hospital told me and then told the police that she thought there was something funny about Marta Warkowski’s finances,” Gregor said. “That she was able to pay her bills too easily. That kind of thing.”

  “There’s nothing funny,” Cary Alder said. “It’s just not very usual these days. My people found she had four or five million dollars stashed in savings accounts and certificates of deposit in maybe a dozen different banks. She’d been putting money away, every single paycheck, for decades.”