Clean Hands

by Patrick Hoffman

“That was DudePorn.com,” Chris argued, his voice shaking. “Those are legal sites, none of this is illegal.”

  The man clicked back to the spreadsheet, and with the mouse, began pointing out URLs that were highlighted. He then opened another file, clicked on it, and a screen grab from a video popped up. “This is Brendan Francis Nelson,” said the man, pointing at the naked boy’s face. “He’s fifteen; he lives in Austin.”

  Chris had never seen that boy, porno or not, but the man was already opening another file. “This is Kent Sampson, fourteen, Alameda, California.” Chris did actually remember looking at that one. “Billy McCormick—what is this? Twinkworld—Littleton, Colorado, sixteen years old. Fourteen times in the last four weeks. We can go through them all if you want.”

  Chris protested that they weren’t on his computer.

  “They’re on your computer,” the man insisted.

  Chris believed him. His mouth went dry. He wanted to ask the men to leave, but he couldn’t come up with the words. This is not fucking fair, he thought. This is total and complete bullshit. I will have your badge. I’ll sue you to the moon and back, motherfucker.

  The man sitting next to him produced a cell phone and showed Chris a saved contact. “Okay, this number is for Ali Roth,” he said. “She is the assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District. She’ll prosecute your case. She’s a boss in the courtroom, merciless. She works for us.”

  He scooted on his seat and leaned forward so he was facing Chris straight on. “Look at me,” he said. His breath smelled like sour milk. “Look at me.”

  Chris did as he was told.

  “You work for us now. This isn’t law school.” He studied Chris’s face in a way that felt strangely intimate. “It’s not court. You work for us.”

  The man leaned back on the couch. The other men had gone deeper into Chris’s apartment, and Chris could no longer see them. The man on the couch angled the laptop toward Chris. It took a moment to understand that he was looking at a video of himself. It had been shot from the ceiling of his kitchen. The video showed Chris making coffee. It had been that morning. Chris was still wearing the same clothes.

  The man closed the computer. “Do you understand what I’m telling you? We know everything about you. No, no, no,” the man said, raising a hand, shifting in his seat and crossing one leg over the other. “I’ve been through this before. This is what we do. It seems big to you, but it’s not. I’ve been through this a thousand times. I’ll tell you one thing for certain—this is for real.”

  Chris—idiotically, in retrospect—protested about the camera.

  The man raised a hand and silenced him. He reached out and put a hand on Chris’s knee. “Your mother lives at 1709 Hunters Point Drive, in Boulder, Colorado,” he said. “Your father lives at 3402 Suskind Road, Chapel Hill. Your sister lives at 693 Elmhurst Park Road, Palo Alto. Your grandmother lives in Ashland, Oregon. I only have to send a text message. It doesn’t even bother me. It would be the easiest decision of my day. No, no, no”—he shushed Chris again—“stop making it so complicated.”

  By that point the two other men had returned to the living room. Chris thought it might be helpful to remember their faces, but he was too scared to look at them. Instead he stared at a space on the floor. After a few seconds, the man with the laptop tapped him on the leg with the back of his hand. Chris looked at him and was surprised to see that his face had transformed; he didn’t look angry anymore. He looked almost friendly. He held out a hand to shake and Chris shook it.

  “You work for us.”

  Valencia Walker, when she got home that night, changed from her work clothes into sweatpants and a simple cotton T-shirt. She lived alone in an expensive, high-ceilinged, two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side that faced Central Park. Standing in her kitchen, she peeled Saran Wrap off her dinner bowl and looked at the salmon dinner her domestic assistant had prepared. Her attention was drawn to a grayish part of the filet. She put the bowl into the microwave and hit the button for ninety seconds. Brain-colored, she thought, while the microwave hummed.

  Her thoughts shifted to the deliveryman and his ransom note. Who the hell would have sent this guy? She was just beginning to consider opening her bathroom blinds to signal a meeting when her thoughts were interrupted by an incoming call on her cell phone. She knew it was Elizabeth before she looked at it.

  “Hello, my dear,” answered Valencia, fitting her earpiece and muting the television news.

  “I changed my mind,” said Elizabeth.

  “Tell me.”

  “What do you think of offering less, say a hundred thousand?”

  Valencia took a sip of wine, set it down, and walked toward her living room. “I don’t think that’s a good option.”

  “Why not?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Liz, this is not a lot of money.” They’d already had this conversation back at the office. Valencia had explained the risk of not paying.

  “It’s not the price,” said Elizabeth. “It’s the partners—Gary? Jeff? Fuck, can you imagine? So guys, we’re being blackmailed …”

  “Tell them what I told you,” said Valencia.

  “That it boils down to—”

  “That we have less than twenty-four hours,” said Valencia, interrupting her. “That there is no reason to believe the threat lacks credibility; that the price is worth stopping the threat; and, finally, most important, that only in paying them—given the hand we’ve been dealt—can we identify them.”

  “So—”

  “So, pay, identify, assess.”

  “And if the partners say, no?”

  “Then you have a PR problem that costs a lot more than seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to fix,” said Valencia. She looked at herself reflected in the window and brushed at her eyebrows. Again, her mind returned to the question of who was blackmailing them. The truth was, she had no idea, and until she was told otherwise, she would treat it like one more problem that needed fixing.

  After a long silence, Elizabeth spoke: “You know when I applied for my first job, fresh out of law school, they asked me what I saw myself doing in five years. You know what I told them?”

  “Judge?”

  “I said I wanted to run a midsized film studio.”

  Valencia smiled. The microwave beeped.

  “I’ll have a plan, on how we’re going to pay, by tomorrow morning,” said Valencia. “It’ll be strong. My men are good, and I can bring in help for this. Experienced, professional, help.”

  “Okay,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  The line went dead.

  Valencia walked back to her kitchen, took a dish towel and lifted the hot bowl out of the microwave. She pulled the plastic wrap off and watched the steam rise. A lemon seed in the quinoa caught her eye and she used her nails to pluck it out. She then spooned the food onto a plate, rinsed the bowl, and put it in the dishwasher.

  Her mind, as she tidied up, stayed on Elizabeth. The woman was tough, there was no question about that. Valencia had seen her shout down a CEO in his own office. She’d seen her dismantle witnesses on the stand. Most important, she’d seen the way Elizabeth’s colleagues and underlings acted around her. She demanded respect. So what would happen if she sat Elizabeth down for a dinner and mapped out exactly what forces were at play here?

  She thought about a past dinner they’d had. It had been two or three years ago. They ate paella at a place in Chelsea, and they were on their second bottle of wine. Elizabeth was drunk and got emotional; she told a story about being molested by an uncle. The uncle—her mother’s brother—had eventually been caught and charged with molesting his own children.

  Elizabeth’s mother demanded to know if he’d ever touched her. She told her mother no. “It was a simple choice,” she said. “He’d already been caught. Why add more problems to everything else?”

  Valencia un-muted the television; on it a baby-faced pundit carried on about congressional dysfunction. She glanced dow
n at her food, isolated the gray bit of salmon, cut it off with her fork, and pushed it to the side of her plate.

  At that exact moment, Chris Cowley, still tucked away in his office, sat clipping his fingernails. It was ten minutes past nine o’clock; a miserable thirteen hours had passed since the pickpocketing. He finished his left hand and swept all the white trimmings off his desk and into the trash. He wondered whether someone would come and collect the trimmings for DNA samples. Anything was possible.

  After changing back into his street clothes, he patted his jacket pocket and confirmed that the thumb drive was still there. Then, keeping his back to the door, he took the drive out, wrapped it in a twenty-dollar bill, and tucked the whole thing back into his pocket. When he was done, he closed his eyes, took a moment and tried to pray. Just help, he prayed. Please, just help.

  He’d been given two tasks for the day. The first was to allow his cell phone to be stolen. That one—while technically criminal and certainly frightening—was relatively simple. The second task was more complicated. His handlers had given him a thumb drive and instructed him to plug it into his boss’s computer.

  He’d argued that he wouldn’t be able to do that, that he didn’t have access to her office.

  The lead man, Jonathan, frowned, shook his head, and told Chris he would. “You have to think positively,” he said.

  And he did. After he confessed that his phone had been stolen, Elizabeth brought him to her office, told him to wait, and excused herself. Just like that, he was left all alone. Pretending to be completely unbothered, he looked around like he was admiring her decor. He yawned, turned, and searched for cameras. The only one he could see was attached to her computer.

  I’ll grab a pen, he told himself. If they come, I’ll say I was grabbing a pen; it’s a pen—he practiced in his mind—I needed a pen. Dry-mouthed, he pulled a yellow Post-it note off a stack on her desk and stuck it above the camera’s lens. After that, he plugged the thumb drive into her computer and watched the screen. A prompt asked: Are you sure you want to run program TX32H on this computer? Chris looked at the door, looked back at the screen, clicked Yes.

  The computer hummed; he waited in misery and watched the blue progress bar slowly fill. When it was done, he pulled the drive from the port, removed the Post-it note from the camera, pushed both into his right pants pocket, and moved back to the other side of the room. Less than a minute later, the door swung open, and Elizabeth and Michael D’Angelo entered the office.

  After that—and after his trip back to Grand Central with Valencia and her men—Chris spent the rest of the day pretending to work. He opened paper files and pretended to read them. He opened documents on his computer and pretended to work on them. He shredded the draft of a motion near the copy machines. He replied to personal emails. He clicked around online. He sat and stared at his screen.

  Finally, at a little after four thirty Elizabeth called him back to her office. Valencia Walker, looking proud and relaxed, was already there. The phone had been found. Everyone was smiling. There was a moment where he felt almost happy. He’d had the thing stolen, and now it was back. Both sides won. He did his job, and it was done. The feeling was short lived. The deliveryman came.

  Which is all to say it didn’t matter if anyone came and collected his fingernails. He had enough problems.

  On his way out, when he finally left for the day, Chris stopped by the bathroom, urinated, pulled on his penis—which seemed to have shrunk—washed his hands, and studied his face in the mirror. A new set of wrinkles had appeared near his eyes. During his walk from the bathroom to the elevator he passed four of his colleagues’ offices; they sat slumped, typing away, utterly ignorant of what was happening around them. The elevator, when it arrived, smelled like cigarettes. He rode down alone.

  Outside, he set off north by foot on Madison Avenue. His mind occupied itself with the question of whether he was currently being followed. Surely somebody from his own law firm would be watching. He could feel the eyes on him, but he resisted the urge to actually turn and look. It didn’t matter. None of it did.

  The street, at any rate, was strangely empty. A few tourists, shivering against the cold spring night, hurried back to their hotels after what appeared to be successful shopping trips. A homeless man begged for change from the doorway of a Brooks Brothers. Steam rose from a vent; taxis and Ubers passed by in steady streams on the street.

  Maybe the lawyer’s life isn’t for me, thought Chris. What would it look like to work for a law firm for the next twenty years? Is that a life worth living? It was a depressing thought. If he could just navigate his way through this little situation, perhaps he’d be able to get out and have a genuine reset.

  This was a wake-up call. He could go into public interest law. Get staffed at the ACLU. Get out of this white-collar hellhole. Maybe give up the law. Move to California. Write a novel. Write a thriller.

  At East Forty-Ninth Street, he turned left and headed west toward Fifth Avenue. From there, he headed up to Fifty-Second Street, where there was a smoothie stand on the corner. After approaching it, he looked in and confirmed that the man he was supposed to meet was there.

  Sitting alone inside the small trailer was one of Chris’s tormentors, the shaved-headed Mexican-looking one with the scars on his face. He nodded when he saw Chris, looked at his watch, and pushed himself up. “What can I get you?” he asked, his eyes not looking directly at Chris, but above and beyond his shoulder at the street behind him.

  Chris looked at the menu and realized he was actually quite hungry. “Strawberry-mango,” he said. “Can you add protein?”

  The man smiled and turned his back to Chris. He made the smoothie with a surprising level of attention, measuring the ingredients carefully. Chris watched him blend them together. He stared at his back while the man worked, and wondered what thoughts were running through his mind. There was something attractive about him, thought Chris. Maybe when it was all done and over, they could meet up, get a hotel, watch some Netflix. Where do you live? Chris thought about asking him, Do you party?

  The man poured the smoothie into a plastic cup and scraped the blender until the cup was filled. He fitted a lid on the cup and brought it to the window.

  “Six dollars,” he said.

  Chris pulled out the thumb drive—wrapped in the twenty-dollar bill—and passed it all through the window, just as he’d been instructed.

  “Thanks,” said the man, handing back fourteen dollars. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Did I wake you?” asked Valencia.

  “Nope, I’m up,” said Billy Sharrock. He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the time. It was 4:45 a.m. He glanced at his bedroom window and saw that it was dark.

  “I need you to go back to that little shop we were at,” said Valencia. “The phone place. Talk to the owner.”

  “How much talking?”

  “As much as he needs,” said Valencia.

  “Alone?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Nah, I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “Get there early, watch the door, make sure he comes in before you enter. We don’t wanna give him any excuses.”

  “Come on, boss,” said Billy. It was too early to insult his intelligence.

  “Call me if you have any problems.”

  The line went dead.

  Billy yawned and looked at his girlfriend, who was still sleeping next to him. They’d been using her for little jobs here and there. She was game and liked the money. For a second, while they’d been talking, Billy thought Valencia was going to ask him to bring her. He wished she had. It would be a lot more entertaining.

  Billy had fractured a knee in Afghanistan, and it always felt tight in the morning. He went straight to the bathroom, shit, showered, and shaved. After getting dressed—he’d wear jeans, a hoodie, and a work jacket for this job—he went to his closet and grabbed a Mets hat.

  In his office, he pulled up a chair near his safe
, sat down, and twisted the dial until the safe opened. He looked at his guns and chose the 9 mm, put it in a soft case, and grabbed two spare magazines. From a different closet, he pulled out a large toolbox and fit the gun case into it. He grabbed a pair of heavy-duty pliers from a different box and a roll of duct tape, and put them in. He found his retractable baton, snapped it open, closed it, and put it in too.

  He went back to his office and grabbed his lock-picking tools. From the back of the closet he pulled out a shoebox that held different license plates; he went through them and selected a set of New York ones, set them into the toolbox, and closed it all up.

  From there he went to his kitchen, brewed coffee, and poured himself a bowl of healthy flakes. His girlfriend said he was getting fat, so he’d been torturing himself with this shit. While he ate, he looked at ESPN on his phone. The NBA playoffs had just begun. He’d grown up outside Indianapolis and liked to keep an eye on the Pacers.

  When he got down to the garage below his apartment building, he pulled out his cell phone and, for billing purposes, took a screenshot of the time. Then he opened the back door of his van and set his toolbox inside. Moving efficiently, he switched out his license plates. He’d made the plates himself, copying numbers from other registered white vans, and using a tin press and enamel paint.

  When he was done swapping plates, he pulled himself into the back of the van, took the toolbox, and placed it inside a larger lockbox. He then hopped out, got in the driver’s seat, backed the van out of its spot, and headed toward Manhattan. He was happy to be up at this time; he liked to get an early start on his day.

  It was 6:14 a.m. when he arrived at the location. He parked the van across from the building that housed the American iPhone Repair shop. Besides an old Chinese woman rooting around in some recyclables, and a few pedestrians walking west, nobody else was on the street. Billy opened his glove box and took out a laminated piece of paper with a New York City Department of Sanitation seal on it, and a phone number that went straight to voicemail at the department. As far as he knew, nobody had ever called. He’d never been issued a parking ticket.