NOT THINKING TOO DEEPLY BEFORE I ACT HAS LED ME DOWN some pretty bizarre paths in life.
Committing crimes with my dad. Lying to get hired at some hot-shit company. Buying a house with someone I’m not married to while having no real knowledge of how owning property works. Trying to siphon money from rich people, and getting caught.
Searching for my neighbor’s mom’s body so I can move it to a safe location.
I’d thought about the first time I handled a dead body as I shoveled up humid mounds of dirt looking for Yolanda Green. My own mom had been watching back then, blood-spattered and angry at me, like I hadn’t just saved her from being the one on the receiving end of a shotgun blast.
Mom and I don’t talk about that.
Ever.
We don’t talk about how I was seventeen and had to leave town abruptly at the beginning of senior year. That’s when I moved in with my dad and learned some things from him that would have come in handy with burying that first body, or maybe would’ve put a stop to the situation before it got that far.
I don’t know where Sydney’s mother is, but I believe that Sydney put her in the ground. I could be wrong, but I’ve been wrong about worse things.
What I’m not sure about is what happened after I got to her apartment. She wanted me, I wanted her, but maybe it was just one of those weird emotional pressure-valve-release things and she was happy for it to end there.
We both passed out after that first round of sex, waking up hours later to the sound of afternoon noise on the block. She got up and had a cigarette, brushed her teeth, and then we did it again, more slowly this time but just as intense. Then we slept some more, until she pulled me into the shower with her after we lay sweating on her bed for a while. In her clawfoot bathtub, she stood naked and soapy beneath my hands, dodging the shower spray because she didn’t want to get her braids wet as she kissed me.
It seemed like some surreal dream outside of everything that’s happened over the last few days, but now we’re back in reality. My body aches from grave-robbing and weird sexual positions and she’s sitting across the table from me, mouth full of guava tart and wide eyes darting back and forth, everywhere but my direction, as she chews.
The air conditioner whines in the background and I fumble around for something to say. I don’t know the banging-after-attempting-to-hide-a-body-for-you etiquette.
“This is awkward as hell,” she finally says, then takes another bite of her tart and pulls her feet up onto her chair so her knees press against the table and block her chest from view. She’s wearing a thin-strapped white tank top and black capri sweats that are both loose and formfitting.
I nod in agreement. “Definitely at the top of the weird-first-dates list for me.”
She chuckles, crumbs dusting her smile as her gaze finally lands on my face.
“Mine too. I guess.” She sighs. “I think . . . I need to talk about the weird week I’ve been having. If not finding my—anything in the garden hasn’t led you to believe I’m crazy, then maybe you’re the only person I can talk about this with. I’ve actually managed to sleep for more than a couple of hours, and my brain is somewhat functional, though I wish it wasn’t.”
“Try me.”
“You saw the Con Ed dude who tried to get into my house,” she says quietly. Her eyes widen. “Didn’t you? That happened, right?”
“Yes. I saw him, I saw the van, and the entire situation was shady. Look, just tell me what you think is going on. I’ll believe you, okay?”
A sliver of this is bullshitting; I don’t know her that well and any number of mental illnesses could be at play. I don’t think that’s the case, but even if it is, she believes whatever she’s about to tell me, and we can take it from there.
She twists her mouth. “And if . . . if what I say is crazy, will you tell me that? And not just call the cops on me?”
I nod. “I won’t call the police.”
She takes a deep breath. “There’s been other stuff, besides that. Two days before the Con Ed guy, I got into an Uber, and the driver locked the doors and drove me to a semi-deserted street. He started saying wild shit about being an ex-cop and civilizing the neighborhood and—I don’t remember everything. It was terrifying.”
My stomach tightens with the sudden fear of what can happen to a woman trapped in the back of a stranger’s car. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know you,” she says. “This week has been like three years long, but this was before you even came here to have coffee.”
She could have disappeared before I’d even had the chance to get to know her.
“Plus, there’s no record of the driver in my account.” Her hands shake a little now and she puts the half-eaten tart down. “Everything started to happen so fast that I couldn’t keep up. That same day, Preston got arrested on some bullshit. And then Mr. Perkins was gone. Drea hasn’t responded to my texts and calls. I heard noise upstairs in her apartment a couple of nights ago, and when I went up there, there were bedbugs on her bed. A lot of them.”
Her increasingly speedy words crash to a halt as she shudders.
“They took the bodega. And then the garden. Everything is . . .” She presses her palms to the outside corners of her eyes and pulls back, stretching the skin while blinking rapidly. She’s trying to prevent another deluge of tears.
“What do you think this all means?” I ask, sounding calmer than I feel. I’m getting that feeling of something bad heading our way.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It feels like someone is messing with me. Not just me. With all of us. But that doesn’t make sense, does it?”
I’m trying to piece together the random things that don’t seem random to her and figure out how to respond when a familiar howling bark comes from outside the house.
“Count,” Sydney says, the tart dropping onto her plate as her body sags with relief. “Thank god.”
She hops up and jogs out of the apartment toward the front door, and I follow at a slower pace; if I’d jogged after her, I would have rammed right into her when she stops short at the top of the outer stairs.
The moving truck comes into view as I step out behind her. There’s a dark-haired middle-aged woman and her blond-fading-to-gray husband standing out front as movers cart their belongings inside. He’s wearing khaki shorts and a button-up shirt and she has on a breezy, expensive dress. Neither of them would look out of place at a gathering at Kim’s parents’ house.
They have a dog on a leash, an old hound who looks up at Sydney and tries to run to her, only to get tugged back.
Sydney slips into flip-flops and starts walking slowly down the stairs. “Count?”
The dog strains toward her again and the woman tugs the leash hard enough that he whines sharply.
“Down, boy,” the man says. “Be a good boy.”
“Are you our new neighbor?” the woman asks with that slightly condescending smile Kim’s mom always used to give me.
“I’m Mr. Perkins’s neighbor,” Sydney replies. “He’s coming home today.”
The couple look at each other, seemingly baffled, before looking back at Sydney. “We own this house,” the woman says. “Our daughter Melissa moved here first, since she was starting school, and then we decided we wanted an adventure in the city, too.”
“Brooklyn is the number one most happening place to live now, even more exclusive than Manhattan,” the husband adds, his voice a parody of a country club Chad that isn’t a parody. “All of our friends are just flocking here, and we didn’t want to be the last ones!”
They laugh, and I just watch them, my whole body feeling heavy as my brain tries to fight what my gut is screaming at me: This isn’t right. This definitely isn’t right. They’re just moving into someone’s house. Mr. Perkins’s house. The man I possibly saw something happen to, and who I was told was visiting his family.
“No,” Sydney says. “Mr. Perkins is coming back for the block party. And that’s his dog.”
The man looks taken aback. “We got this dog at the shelter. Someone had abandoned it—you know some people don’t like dogs. Reminds them of when they could be chased down and returned to slavery. That’s what I heard.”
“It really is a shame,” his wife says, frowning. “The dogs didn’t do anything to deserve that kind of hatred.”
“Whoa,” I cut in, but Country Club Chad talks right over me.
“As for Mr. Perkins, trust me, he was paid more than enough to be able to move somewhere else. Wherever he wanted. I don’t see what the problem is.”
“He wouldn’t move without telling me or anyone else,” Sydney says angrily. “And where would he go? This is his neighborhood. We’re his neighbors! He wouldn’t just leave us.”
The woman steps closer to her husband, as if she’s scared of being attacked.
“This isn’t a very hospitable welcome,” the husband says in the same tone he used to chastise Count. “And if you want to continue, you should know I’m close friends with the chief of police.”
“Sydney, come on,” I say, doing my own Country Club Chad parody. “Let’s go to my place.”
She resists my tug at her arm, then whirls up the steps to her house and down the hall.
“Oh wait. You’re Kim’s latest? Weren’t you at the house last summer?” the husband asks while Sydney’s gone. “She always picks up the most interesting playthings. I guess you do, too.”
“You know Kim?”
His brow wrinkles. “Of course—”
“Charlie! Go make sure the movers don’t break that. It’s been in my family for years and he just dropped it without a second thought!”
Charlie gives me a strange look, the look you give someone when you greet them like a friend and then realize they’re just a similar-looking stranger.
He and his wife head over to the moving truck, tugging Count along with them, and Sydney storms back down the stairs with my duffel bag over her shoulder, various papers shoved haphazardly inside. She glances at Charlie and his wife as they stand next to a giant carved-wood African statue that the movers are about to take up the stairs.
I guide Sydney into my house—Kim’s house—and into the first-floor apartment. Which isn’t a cauldron that hasn’t been cleaned for a month, like mine. Sydney and I push aside the expensive curtains and glare at the people who claim they bought a house that wasn’t for sale.
Terry and Josie wander over with Arwin and Toby, greeting the newcomers with a combination of air kisses and firm handshakes.
Sydney pushes past me and drops onto the couch. “Am I going crazy? Please tell me the truth, because I already thought I was, but this feels like I’m going crazy for real.”
I flex my hands, breathing slowly, trying to collect my thoughts. Mr. Perkins was so kind and welcoming to me, and constant, and now he’s just gone.
“I was at the meeting,” I say. “He had no plans to move, and he wouldn’t leave his dog if he did. If you’re crazy, I’m crazy, too.”
She covers her face with her hands for a few minutes and I don’t push her; a moment of quiet wouldn’t hurt either of us right now.
Eventually, she sighs shakily through her fingers and her head pops up.
“I’m thinking about the tour,” she says, which is maybe the last thing I expect her to say.
“The tour? You still want to do it tomorrow?” I can’t keep the edge of you’re kidding me out of my voice.
“We looked up a lot of history. We talked to a lot of people. And some of those things are ringing bells for me now.”
She looks at me for a long moment, as if waiting for me to guess, but I have no clue what she’s talking about.
“I researched the past and present of Gifford Place. Of Brooklyn. I wanted to throw my middle finger up at Zephyr, at VerenTech, at . . . at you.”
I get what she means, but it still chafes. “At gentrification.”
She nods. “But I hadn’t found the thing that ties it together. The hook, like brownstones, or famous architects, or whatever. And if I’m right, this hook is fucking old and sharp. There are patterns in all of these situations that were just going to be stops on the tour, spiraling out from the beginning.” She pauses, licks her lips. “None of this is happening by chance. How could it?”
“What do you mean?” I ask. I told her I would believe her, but I’d already dealt with Kim’s paranoia—
Kim’s words slam into me.
“There are just so few of us.”
“We need to know whether there’s anything to worry about. Safety-wise.”
They had a private group on OurHood . . . What for?
Charlie knows Kim. Knows me.
Sydney kicks the coffee table that I’ve always hated away from the couch, pulls my duffel between her legs, and starts picking through the mess of papers. When she speaks, her words spill out in a rush.
“Okay. Boom. Remember when you came to Mr. Perkins’s before the meeting and I was reading about Underhill? Well, no, you wouldn’t remember that, but this is what I was reading.” She pulls out an old yellowed pamphlet. “It’s this British dude jerking off about how great killing Native Americans is so you can take their land and about how America is great because it’s so uninhabited. The cognitive dissonance of that, right? He wouldn’t be out there killing Native Americans if no one was on the land. He was a mercenary for the colonizers, basically, and the Dutch hired him to kill the Natives around here. He helped pave the way for New York City as it is now.”
“Okay.” I take the pamphlet and stare at it, going along with her but worried for the first time that her beliefs are going to fall into the “all in her head” category. “So, this was in the 1600s?”
“Yes,” she says. “Now think about the info from the heritage center. The laws preventing Black people from passing down property they owned to their children were put in place in the 1700s. Weeksville was founded in the 1800s because you had to own land to vote, which is why they made it so hard for Black people to own land.” She’s nodding as she talks. “The people in Weeksville build a whole community, and then boom, suddenly the government just has to plow right through with Eastern Parkway, like no one lived there? Just like they did with the indigenous people. Just like they’ve done with so many communities when you do even the most basic Google search for this. Central Park was built on a Black community. I am leaving a whole lot out right now, but it’s like this cycle repeating over and over again.”
“Hey. Maybe we need to just think on this a bit,” I say.
“You don’t see the pattern? I thought you said we were both crazy. Damn it, Theo.” She plucks a packet of papers out, flips a few pages, and then shakes it at me. “These are internal documents from the VerenTech Pharma proposal. Compare this description of the neighborhood and Underhill’s little manifesto.”
Her eyes are wide, begging me to make the connection, so I glance back and forth between the two pieces of evidence she’s given me.
“Okay, are you saying you think some dude from the 1600s is involved in the VerenTech Pharmaceuticals headquarters?”
She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose before speaking.
“No! I’m saying that this VerenTech memo feels like the same thing. How they talk about all the resources in the neighborhood that are underutilized, even though we’re right fucking here? And now Abdul is gone and some racist motherfucker owns the bodega. Mr. Perkins—the Mayor of Gifford Place—supposedly just up and moved, without telling a single soul?”
“Where did you even get this from?” I ask, flipping through the pages.
Her hand slaps to her mouth then.
“Oh no. Fuck.” She pulls out her phone, swipes around, and her face falls. “Drea. I got it from Drea. She’s been typing for like three fucking days!”
I look at her, hunched over her phone, eyes wide, body taut with terror. I should get far away from here, right now. This is above my pay grade. I was going along with her, but right now she’s possibly having a psychotic break. Something is going on here, though, even if Sydney’s behavior is freaking me out.
I think of William Bilford mimicking the kaboosh of a nuclear bomb.
“Remember what you said about how you got caught at your company?” Sydney’s voice is suddenly dull. “That you triggered some internal system, or something?”
She gently pulls the VerenTech pages from my hand, flips to the first document, and reads it. “‘The Company (VerenTech) acknowledges that this Memorandum is a public record subject to disclosure but do hereby require that we be notified of any and all FOIA requests, both during the city selection process and in the event that a city is chosen, to allow the Company to seek a protective order or other appropriate remedy.’”
“Other appropriate remedy,” I repeat, taking the papers back from her. That seems like something designed to scare people on its own, but along with everything else it’s kind of ominous. “You know, there is a chance that Drea ran off. She’s an adult.”
“She wouldn’t,” Sydney says, a sudden fierceness in her tone. “It’s possible she made a mistake, but we’ve been friends for half of our lives. She’s never let me down and she sure as hell wouldn’t run from me.”
The look in her eye is how my mom looked at me when she’d let her asshole boyfriend move back in after telling me he was gone for good—indignation, hope, and desperation.
“Okay.” I nod and flip through the projection pages that show the future plans for the neighborhood. “Sometimes a company tries to push their luck. Get in ahead of the competition. Or ahead of anyone who might want to stop them. Same as a gang or any other criminal enterprise.”
I look at the clean, reimagined future of the neighborhood; this is what was sold to me and Kim by the realtors. They’d talked of revitalization and changing demographics and I’d nodded along because of course that had nothing to do with me, but I’d still get to reap the benefits. And when there are benefits to be reaped, there’s always someone ready to do some illegal shit to get even more of them.
I know that all too well.
Sydney sits on the floor beside the duffel bag and wraps her arms around her knees, staring at the couch as she thinks.
“I’m worried about Kavaughn, too. Len said he went down south, but it’s not like him to just dip like that.”
Kavaughn, the guy I replaced as her researcher, the reason I inserted myself into this mess to begin with.
She grabs her phone again and makes a call, putting it on speaker this time. We both stare at the picture of the thick-necked man on the screen.
“Jesus Christ.” I pick up the phone as an automated message announces that the number is no longer in service.
Sydney looks up at me. “What is it?”
I wave the phone from side to side as his picture fades away. “This is the guy that came at me in front of the medical center that I tried to tell you about. He was on something. I assumed he was just your average methhead—”
“Meth isn’t the drug of choice here, Theo. And especially not for Kavaughn.”
“Okay, whatever. He was high. But at the meeting, Len said Kavaughn went to visit his grandmother, right? And if he was high and roaming around grabbing people, wouldn’t someone in the neighborhood know he was back? I can’t have been the only person to have seen him.”
“Kavaughn doesn’t mess with drugs,” she says, shaking her head. “He is absolutely a ‘drugs are a tool of the oppressor’ type dude. He doesn’t even drink coffee. Are you sure it was him?”
I close my eyes and bang my fist lightly against my forehead as I remember when he bumped into me. I’d assumed he was trying to attack me, but in retrospect . . . I saw that fear in his eyes.
“Please. Money.”
Was that really what he’d been saying?
“Mommy is in the garden. Mommy.” That’s what Sydney said. I’m not used to adults calling their mothers that, but . . .
My stomach lurches.
“Did he live with his mother?” I ask.
“With his grandmother, but she raised him, so she was basically his mom.”
His garbled words repeat in my head, but this time I don’t imagine he’s begging for money for his next fix. I imagine he’s asking for what most disoriented people ask for when they’re terrified. The sounds are so similar.
“Mommy? Bring Mommy. Help. Please! Please!”
I’d reacted to what I was taught to think when a large Black man ran up to me acting strangely.
Drugs.
Crime.
Danger.
And when the cops asked me where he’d gone, I ratted him out. A couple days later, I’d glibly pulled on a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and got pissy when I was called on it.
“Was it him?” she asks again.
I want to lie to her, to ignore my disgust with myself and the fear growing into a palpable presence in my torso.
“It was him. For sure.” I look at her. “I’d stopped because I thought I saw something moving through the window in the old hospital. And when he attacked me . . . it was right after I asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital.”
She stares at me, that distance in her gaze again, and I don’t volunteer that I snitched on him to the cops.
“Okay, let’s just . . . process for a minute,” she says.
I pull out my own phone and sit beside her. At my last job, I learned that most companies have their fingers in many pies, no matter what their business. Hell, even before that, working with my dad in low-level shit had taught me how a front operates. How dirty money gets clean.
“Most of this stuff happened after the VerenTech announcement,” I say.
She nods.
I hear William’s kaboosh again.
I Google “VerenTech + Brooklyn + Real Estate.” The first few pages are a mix of articles from this week celebrating the borough’s winning the VerenTech contracts and older ones warning of the harm the company might bring. Nothing stands out, but I scroll until something snags my eye:
VerenTech, which is primarily known for its pharmaceutical endeavors but is also the primary shareholder in Bevruch Ten Properties (BVT Realty) . . .
That’s the agency Kim and I used. I flash Sydney my screen.
“They’re the ones putting up all those condos,” she says, her voice surprisingly subdued.
As Sydney gazes over my shoulder, I Google “VerenTech + Bevruch Ten Properties.”
This time only a handful of results show up. One is a link to an r/shadybusiness forum page about the VerenTech campus search.
Brooklyn can have them. Everyone forgets about the town they bought in Connecticut in the early 00s. Promised tons of wealth, but they used eminent domain to kick people out of their houses and then never built their location there. Local businesses all closed down because they had no customers. Politicians and investors all lost big. It turned into a ghost town.
There’s a link in response that I hesitate to click on but do.
A diagram of all the businesses connected to VerenTech pops up in a new tab. Smaller or larger circles reflect how much money each subsidiary produces for the company overall. VerenTech (pharmaceuticals) is large, but only slightly smaller is the circle representing Civil Communities Inc. (private prison company).
“These motherfuckers,” Sydney growls.
Several smaller circles cluster around that, offshoots of that company. The third-largest circle is BVT Realty, and the fourth is . . .
“Veritas Bank. Isn’t that the one you told me about?” Sydney asks. “The one the former slaveowner started?”
“Yeah. And when I looked them up, a lot of the headlines were people calling them out for offering subprime loans to minorities in the lead-up to the 2008 housing bubble bursting.”
“Gaining how many houses when the foreclosures started rolling out,” Sydney says bitterly. She expands the circle around BVT Realty so that a pixelated name in a smaller circle takes up most of the screen: Good Neighbors LLC.
“Those are the people who stole Mommy’s house. Drea—” She takes a deep breath. “Drea once told me that BVT got special treatment, which is why they’re building here more than anyone else. She also said someone had pulled lots of strings for the VerenTech deal.”
“I’m no Robin Hood, but one of the reasons I felt okay stealing from my job was because so much of the money coming in was graft, pure and simple,” I say. “They laundered more cleanly than the job I had before, but people who have money use that money to make more of it, and they don’t care who they hurt while doing that. VerenTech has more money than most of us can imagine.”
“They chose Brooklyn, out of all the places vying for their new campus,” Sydney says. “The most expensive place, but the one that would make them the most money once they got us all out of here. If they’ve been collecting houses since the earlier housing crises . . .”
“Yeah. It’s possible that this has been years in the making.”
Sydney meets my gaze, and I confirm what she said a minute ago, because something like this bears repeating to make it real.
“Something shady is going on here, and it’s connected to them.”