Clean Hands

by Patrick Hoffman

  Still, he maintained his stride, kept his eyes on her, and even managed to nod. They were alone in the hallway. They didn’t speak, they just passed each other, and the look on Elizabeth’s face left Chris feeling bothered for the rest of the afternoon. He played the scene over and over in his mind and tried to analyze exactly what had been so disturbing about her expression. It wasn’t the displeasure; beneath that he sensed something worse: sadness. Anger was one thing, sadness another. She was sad for him. She pitied him. Fuck, Chris thought. I really am fucked.

  At 3:47 p.m. he checked his cell phone and saw that he’d missed a call from his mother. Standing by the window in his office he called her back. They had just gotten through their normal routine of insipid greetings when she said something truly disturbing: “So remind me who that friend was that stopped by last night?”

  “What friend?” asked Chris. He tried to make his voice sound calm and not betray any of the fear he was feeling.

  “Didn’t you listen to my message?”

  “No, Mom—I just called you back,” he said, chopping at the air with his hand. “What friend are you talking about?”

  “Hold on.”

  Chris looked out the window and imagined throwing himself from it. He’d feel the rush of air and see the ground racing to meet him; the traffic noise would grow louder as he flew down, and the gray pavement would turn black.

  “Where is it?” said his mother. “Oh, here, yes, I wrote it down: John. He said to tell you he happened to be passing through town and he thought you’d be here. What?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” said Chris.

  “Honey, I told him—wait, I had something else I needed to tell you. What did I—”

  “Mom, what did he say? Who was he?”

  “He said he was your friend.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Honey, he looked like your friend Drew, but older. I thought he was one of Drew’s brothers for a minute but—”

  “What exactly did he say?” asked Chris, taking the phone away from his ear and speaking into it like a handheld radio.

  “He said, ‘Hi, Ms. Cowley.’ I said, ‘Ms. Peterson now,’ and he said, ‘Is Chris around?’ He said you told him you’d be here.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You’re in New York. You’re not coming home, are you?”

  Chris rubbed his eyes and thought about how much he should tell her. “No, Mom, unfortunately, I’m not. I think we just got our signals crossed.”

  “Our what?”

  “We got our signals crossed. Mom, listen, let me call you back a little bit later, okay?”

  “Okay, honey, Bill and I will be at Murphy’s with Linda and Tim, but after that—”

  After ending the call, Chris stood there staring out the window. How bad, he wondered. How bad is this? It was clearly a threat. The man on the train came back to him: “Stop acting so depressed.”

  Chris turned from the window and was startled to see Michael D’Angelo, the investigator, standing in his doorway. “Jesus,” Chris said. “Don’t you knock?” He couldn’t hide his anger.

  “Sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt you,” said D’Angelo, stepping into the office, holding his hands in front of his crotch. “It sounded …”

  “It’s my mother,” said Chris. “She’s having a really hard time.”

  “It sounded urgent.”

  “No,” said Chris. The two men stood there staring at each other for a moment until Chris asked what he could do for him.

  “Just checking in. You seemed kind of shaken up the other day. Again, I just …”

  Chris stood there blinking. How the hell was he going to get rid of this imbecile? He tried to smile, but it only made him feel sadder. He turned toward the window, then back to D’Angelo, and said, “I’m having a really hard time with my boyfriend. He just, like, doesn’t get me.”

  D’Angelo nodded, pursed his lips, and said, “Well, like I said, any time you need to talk, just let me know.” He took a step back toward the door.

  Chris saw his advantage and pressed on. “It’s just, like, relationships aren’t easy, you know?”

  “I do,” said D’Angelo, but instead of retreating the way Chris had hoped he would, he stopped and stood there, looking at the ground and shaking his head.

  “Anyway,” said Chris.

  “Yeah,” said D’Angelo, looking up. “I’ll let you get back to it.”

  At his desk, Chris put his head in his hands and hummed a song to himself. Then he straightened up and checked the time; it was 3:51 p.m.

  The expression on Elizabeth Carlyle’s face wasn’t the kind of pitying look that Chris had presumed. It was simply depression; an etched-on, deep depression. Which isn’t to say she’d forgotten about Chris, just that she was done thinking about him. Her energy was not well spent on such a small character. Her problems were much larger than Chris Cowley. Her problems were legion.

  At four p.m., Edwin Kerins, one of the Calcott Corporation’s in-house counsel was calling for his regular weekly update. Elizabeth had already told him Chris Cowley’s phone had been stolen, and that it had documents from the case on it. She hadn’t yet told him they were being blackmailed, and she didn’t intend to.

  “Edwin in five,” said Andy, when she passed his desk.

  “I know,” she said, entering her office and closing the door behind her. She went to her mirror and applied a new coat of lipstick. She checked her skin and brushed off a little bit of visible powder on her jawline. She checked her roots for gray. Stand straight, she told herself, pulling her shoulders back, and adjusting her bra. She went to her desk and sat down.

  For the hundredth time that day, she reviewed the state of the case as she waited for the call to come in. After the failed merger, Emerson Trust Bank sued the Calcott Corporation for breach of contract and other claims. Calcott, in turn—under Elizabeth’s guidance—counter-sued with forty-six claims of their own.

  Embedded inside one of these claims was an allegation that Emerson Trust had colluded in bond-price manipulation. The fact of the matter was both banks had colluded in this way. They’d been fixing the price of unsecured bonds for years. Elizabeth was essentially playing a billion-dollar game of chicken. She was daring Emerson to go through with their suit, telling them she would expose both of their bond-rigging practices if they went forward. It was the nuclear option, and she was playing it in the opening hand.

  All of it—because of the money to the shell company in Oman. Elizabeth thought about the conversation she’d had with the fund manager who made that transaction. He told her it had been vetted by someone named Maurice Denny, another in-house attorney for the Calcott Corporation. When Elizabeth tried to talk to Denny, she was told that he had retired eight months earlier.

  When she called him on his home phone, Denny apologized. He told her he wouldn’t be able to speak with her, and that she should call his attorney. She’d brought this information to Charles Bloom, the CEO of Calcott.

  He’d stood up from his desk, stepped to the door and closed it. He motioned for her to sit at the table near the window. He then told her that the money had been sent to encourage a licensing deal on an oil field in Saudi Arabia.

  “It was a sloppy move. I shut it down,” he said. “Maurice Denny is a good man. He’s a family man. He worked for me for sixteen years. I asked him to retire when this came to my attention.”

  It had taken Elizabeth great effort not to show any sign of incredulity. “I asked him to retire,” repeated Charles Bloom. “And he did. As far as I’m concerned that little chapter is closed.”

  Chiming over her intercom, Elizabeth’s assistant interrupted her thinking: Edwin Kerins was on line three.

  “Edwin, how are you?” said Elizabeth, leaning back in her chair as she answered the phone.

  “I’ve had better days,” he said. “You saw the judge’s ruling on our motion to preclude?”

  “Yes,” she lied, opening her email and s
canning it to see if she’d missed anything. There was nothing about a ruling. “Unbelievable. But predictable.”

  “Exactly,” said Edwin. “Bloom’s gonna have a real shit fit over this.” The man was famous for his shit fits. “But what is he going to do? Fire us all?”

  “Tell him bad rulings are good for the record, and Judge Sandoval is leaving a—”

  “Honestly, Liz, I think in this situation it would make more sense if you could inform him. I mean it was your gang that argued it, and it seems like you might have a better handle on the—”

  “Okay, let me talk to Sujung. I’ll schedule a call for tomorrow,” said Elizabeth, tapping her hand impatiently on her desk.

  “Perfect,” he said. “And just so we’re on the same page, narrative-wise, Jimmy Hipps says the best approach, press-wise, is absolute silence. No stories. I know you know that, but Jimmy, well—you know.”

  “Of course,” said Elizabeth. She checked her cell phone for any missed messages from Valencia. There were none.

  “So, from our end we’ll have Eric, Miles, Ken, and Doug J. work on the discovery requests, and on your end, you and Sujung and her team will continue with document review and evidence prep.”

  Edwin Kerins droned on for another thirty-five minutes. Elizabeth pictured him sitting back in his chair with his feet crossed on his desk. That’s what kind of lawyer he was. He was twelve years her junior, with extremely limited trial experience. Nevertheless, when he paused, or, even better, asked if she agreed with what he was saying, she told him she did. The man wasn’t worth arguing with. He was a non-player, but she couldn’t just ignore him; she had to humor him.

  When the call finally ended, she dialed Valencia on her mobile. She needed good news, but the call went straight to voicemail.

  Fourteen miles to the south, in Brighton Beach, Yuri, Isaac, and Moishe were just arriving at Agniya’s Laundry Service. After entering and seeing that there were no customers, Yuri thought about turning the dead bolt and flipping the sign to Closed. Instead, he made a little show of looking out the front window like he was afraid of being followed. In the middle of this he realized how tense his face was.

  He tried to make it relax by opening his mouth, then decided this might look even more strange, so he turned back into the room and made a fuss of brushing at some lint on his pants.

  Agniya, a doughy woman in her seventies, was a distant cousin of the brothers and had grown up with the older Rabinowitz family outside Moscow. Now, standing behind the counter, with her hands in her sweatshirt pockets, she greeted the boys by shaking her head like they were late.

  Yuri watched Isaac step to the counter. He leaned over it and kissed the old woman on both cheeks in a way that made her smile. As this was happening, Moishe placed the bag of money on the counter, dusted his hands off, and patted his pockets.

  “Boys,” said Agniya, “it’s been over a year since you’ve come to my house. We’re old now, how much longer do you think we have?” She looked at each one of them, pleading. “The only pictures we’ve taken were at Leonid’s wedding. You were children then. I have beautiful picture frames at home that are hanging on the walls empty.” She stopped talking long enough to take a breath. “Nothing inside. Empty frames. Do you know how horrible that is?”

  Just then a fire truck raced past the store, sirens blaring. Yuri pulled at his jacket sleeves. Agniya had a special talent for making him feel guilty.

  The woman moved to the bag of money, put both hands on the paper sack, as if she were estimating its girth, and then called out, “Yulia!”

  A moment later a young laundress wearing a head scarf appeared from the back of the store and without looking at the visitors, picked up the bag of money and disappeared behind the garment conveyor.

  Yuri watched her go, then looked back at Agniya.

  “I’m telling you this not for my own benefit,” said the old woman. “I’m saying it for your well-being. You never know how much you miss your relatives”—here she tapped her bosom, frowned—“until they are gone.” She knitted her meaty fingers together in front of her chest. “Think of your father.”

  “Auntie, please,” said Yuri. “We’ll visit. We promise. We’ll even bring Moishe.” He put his hand on his friend’s back.

  “Please?” said Agniya.

  Yuri nodded. “We will,” he said, switching to English.

  “You’re going to see your uncle now?” she asked.

  When they said yes, she went to the conveyor and pulled out four plastic-covered dress shirts. “Drop these to him,” she said. The men kissed her goodbye, opened the door, and left.

  “Fuck,” said Isaac, when they got outside. “She’s worse than Mom.”

  From there, they walked under the Q tracks toward Yakov’s office. Isaac carried the clean shirts slung over his shoulder. While not all the shopkeepers in the area knew specifically who these young men were, they had a sense of what they were, and they watched them without making a fuss.

  The office was on the third floor of a corner brick building on Brighton Beach Avenue. The ground floor of the building housed a discount clothing store. The men walked past the store—flirting with a young saleswoman on their way—and rounded the corner to a side door that led up to the office. Yuri pressed a small black doorbell and all three men stood straight for the camera until the metal door buzzed open.

  Yuri led the way up the stairs. The second floor of the building housed a real estate firm Uncle Yakov had helped set up. Yuri glanced in the window but didn’t see anyone and kept climbing the stairs. When they got to the third floor, they rang a second doorbell, and again stood with their faces toward a small camera.

  Yuri looked at the floor and saw a tangle of light brown hair. A moment later, their uncle’s bodyguard, Grigory Levchin, opened the door. The big man greeted each of them, shaking their hands, giving Yuri a half hug, and then leaned and looked down the stairs to make sure nobody had followed them into the building. He put his arm around Isaac, squeezed his biceps, and led the group toward their uncle’s office.

  While he walked, he spoke in Russian about an associate of theirs who had been arrested in Germany.

  The hallway was carpeted, and there were posters of vacation destinations on the wall, making it look like they’d walked into a travel agency. Jamaica, Puerto Vallarta, Costa Rica, Málaga.

  Yuri could hear the sound of a baby crying somewhere on the other side of the office, and, from the other direction, the pounding noise of a jackhammer. He could smell Grigory’s cologne. It smelled like sandalwood.

  Their uncle’s door was closed. Grigory took his arm off Yuri’s shoulder, turned toward the three of them, and held his hands up like he was trying to calm an impatient crowd. “He’s just finishing something,” said Grigory.

  “We saw Dimitri,” said Isaac.

  Grigory made a pained face, as though this news bothered him. “Six years, but he kept it”—Grigory made a zipped-mouth gesture—“the man is a crazy son of a bitch, you have to respect him. What did he say about us?”

  “He said to say hello,” said Isaac.

  “To pay our respects,” said Yuri.

  “Whatever,” said Isaac, switching to English. “Dima’s the man. I love that guy.”

  Grigory shook his head, pointed at Isaac. “Dimitri is not the man. He can be a good person for keeping his mouth shut, but you say hello, you greet him, you shake his hand, you pay your respects, and you move on. You don’t go drinking with him. You don’t go to your clubs with him. The man is tainted, you know what I mean?”

  Yuri turned toward his younger brother. “I told you,” he said. He grabbed the laundry out of his brother’s hand. “You’ll wrinkle it, stupid.”

  Isaac made a face; Yuri’s behavior was embarrassing him. Yuri’s cheeks got warm and he pretended to attend to the shirts. Fucking little shit, he thought. Arrogant prick.

  After a moment the door opened and they heard the sound of goodbyes being exchanged. Three men Yuri h
ad never seen before stepped out of the room. They looked Russian, but there was something different about them. For a moment, Yuri wondered if they’d come from over there.

  “Mr. Rabinowitz’s nephews,” said Grigory, lowering his chin and holding his hand toward Yuri.

  The man closest to Yuri was tanned and had deep wrinkles on his forehead; the comb-marked sides of his white hair were slicked back behind his ears. All three of the strangers wore neatly ironed pants, silky sweaters, and expensive shoes. One of them had a gold chain visible underneath his sweater. One carried a soft briefcase. The wrinkle-faced one shook Yuri’s hand, lifted his eyebrows to the laundry and said, “Good boy.”

  Grigory shook hands with all three of the men, and then they were led out. “Los Angeles,” said Grigory, under his breath when they were gone.

  “Hollywood,” said Isaac. “MTV, fucking Vanderpump, all of it. Send me to work for them. I’ll be their protection.”

  Grigory shushed him, and they entered their uncle’s office. The place was large and had high ceilings, but it wasn’t fancy. The lights were fluorescent. About a dozen cardboard boxes, stacked three high, leaned against the far wall. A never-ending supply of merchandise seemed to accumulate in this building.

  Yuri’s eyes passed from the cardboard boxes to a pile of new purses in the far corner. A tall, dust-covered fan stood near the purses and blew a soft breeze back over the room. Yakov Rabinowitz—wearing a light tan sweater and looking wealthy—sat behind his desk and smiled when he saw the group. He seemed well rested and pleased with the meeting he’d just had.

  Grigory took the laundry out of Yuri’s hands and hung it in a closet. The place smelled of cigarettes even though a window had been cracked.

  Uncle Yakov got up from his seat and crossed the room. He grabbed Yuri’s hands, pulled him in, and kissed him on both cheeks. He then repeated this greeting with Isaac and Moishe. “Good boys,” said their uncle, gesturing toward the closet. “You visited your sweet aunt.”

  He tapped his chest: “Agniya—poor light from the sun—you wouldn’t know it now, but she used to be the most beautiful girl.”