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 police 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.”
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.”
“Why all the banks?”
“My guess would be FDIC insurance,” Cary Alder said. “This isn’t a sophisticated woman. Her savings strategy was idiotic. When she started, she probably got three percent for her trouble. These days, she probably doesn’t get one. But she wasn’t looking to make a ton of money. She was looking to be safe. FDIC covers the first quarter of a million of the money you’ve got in the bank if the bank goes bust. She’s got her money parceled out so that if there’s a crash, she’ll still be solvent. The FDIC insurance will cover big chunks of it.”
“And she’s got enough money so that you’re never going to be able to force her out of that apartment,” Gregor said.
“Right. So we stopped trying. Once we knew what the score was, we just decided to live with it. Except Hernandez couldn’t live with it. He kept coming across these people who needed bigger apartments. He wouldn’t stop nagging at her about it. So she didn’t just take us to housing court, she took us to regular court. She took him to court. She got a restraining order against him. She got fifty thousand dollars out of us at one point because we didn’t keep him away from her. Anyway, as soon as I saw her out there in the hall, I knew he’d been at it again. So I called him and had a fit. I got him on his cell phone, so I suppose he could have been anywhere at the time, but she was here.”
“And you did talk to her,” Gregor said.
“Absolutely,” Cary Alder said. “I let her into the office and did my best to calm her down. We’d managed to go a couple of years without ending up with her in any kind of court. I’ve got two enormous building projects, both luxury projects. I’ve got loans. I’ve got lines of credit. Ending up in court means you end up publicly exposed. Ending up publicly exposed means all kinds of people start looking into all kinds of things. A luxury building project is a balancing act. I didn’t want to fall off the high wire.”
“Are you on a high wire?” Gregor asked.
Cary Alder ignored this. “If nothing else happens to you, you get the inspectors,” he said. “There are hundreds of building and construction regulations in this town, issued by half a dozen different departments, and some of those regulations contradict each other. There is no such thing as being entirely in compliance. Which means the city can bring down your project any time it wants. So you stay under the radar.”
Gregor tried the hummus with the cilantro in it, just to know. It was awful.
“Anyway,” Cary Alder said again. “I let her in finally, and I talked to her. I must have talked to her for over an hour. She was livid and she was fed up and I don’t really blame her. She was also handing out ultimatums. Which she could have made good on, by the way. You know what else happens when you don’t fly under the radar? If some jerk decides to take you down, he’s likely to take a lot of your people with you, even people who haven’t done anything really wrong. Then the mess gets bigger. And bigger.”
“I take it there’s quite a lot of mess going on there to get bigger,” Gregor said dryly.
“I had the Aldergold in my desk,” Cary Alder said. “I gave it to her as a kind of appeasement. I had to explain it to her. She didn’t know what it was. I tried to stress that she could use it to come into one of these places and have dinner or whatever. On Alder Properties.”
“Would they have let her in?”
“Sure. If you’ve got Aldergold, they let you in. And they treat you like anybody else with Aldergold. If they don’t, they get fired. They might have stuck her in a back booth out of sight, but they would have let her in and they would have served her.”
“So she took the Aldergold and then what? She went away?”
“I put her in a cab and paid for it,” Cary Alder said. “It was dark by then, really dark. And that’s the last I saw of her. I don’t know what happened after that. I don’t know how she ended up in a garbage bag. I don’t know how Hernandez ended up dead in her apartment. Hell, I don’t know how Hernandez ended up in her apartment at all. And if she had a gun, it’s news to me.”
Gregor took an olive. It was a Kalamata olive. There was nothing you could do to ruin an olive. It was just fine.
“Well,” he said. “Here’s one thing. If Hernandez is the one who put Marta Warkowski in the garbage bag, she couldn’t have shot him. And if she shot him, he couldn’t be the one who put her in the garbage bag.”
For some reason, it felt as claustrophobic and suffocating outside the Aldermine Cavern as in it. It didn’t help that Gregor’s phone was full of messages delayed by the Cavern’s thick walls. This seemed distinctly dysfunctional to him. Surely the kind of people who would want to spend time in the Cavern would also want to get their messages in real time. Maybe he had underestimated Cary Alder. Gregor always had some respect for people who bucked the smart phone hegemony.
He looked around with no particular purpose for a while, wondering if he should go home or back to the detectives’ squad room or off to a place where he could plausibly pretend to be out of communication. He was slightly disoriented, or he would have realized where he was. He’d been here only two weeks ago, when they were finalizing the paperwork that brought Javier to the sisters and then to Cavanaugh Street.
“Chickie,” Gregor said to himself.
Then he checked the building numbers on both sides of the street and headed up the block.
At the door to the building that housed Marshall, Burbank, Callahan, and Freed, Gregor identified himself to the doorman and asked for Edmund George. The doorman got busy and official looking at his switchboard and then waved Gregor to the bank of elevators. It was at the last minute that Gregor realized the man was armed, the distinct bulge not quite concealed under his left armpit. More and more lately, Russ’s ravings seemed less like ravings than like prophecies.
And that was very bad news.
Ed George was waiting outside the elevators when Gregor got to the fifth floor. Marshall, Burbank, Callahan, and Freed had that entire floor and the one above it. As usual these days, Ed looked professional, prosperous, and straitlaced. Nobody would think to call him Chickie.
“Are you all right?” Ed asked as Gregor got out of the elevator. “You look a little stunned.”
“I was in the Aldermine Cavern,” Gregor said. “I am a little stunned. And then for some reason, I was thinking of you as Chickie. I don’t know where that came from.”
“It’s a blast from the past,” Ed said. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. I think of myself as Chickie sometimes, too. And I bring Chickie out at least once a year for Pride. Come on back. I can actually carve out half an hour. I just had an appointment cancel on me.”
Gregor followed Ed through the maze of cubicles to the back of the floor, where the associates had their tiny little offices, then beyond that to the slightly larger offices reserved for junior partners. Ed was a junior partner. He even had a window.
“You didn’t have to come all the way down here,” he said. “I told Bennis I’d come up to Cavanaugh Street whenever you needed me. And you should be in good shape, at least for the moment. How’s Javier?”
“He seems to be doing pretty well,” Gregor said.
Ed had a visitor’s chair. He kicked it out where Gregor could get to it and then went behind his desk to sit down.
“What were you doing in the Aldermine Cavern?” he asked. “There’s something that doesn’t sound like your thing. I’d think Bennis would spit on it.”
“I don’t think she’s that dramatic,” Gregor said. “I was talking to Cary Alder.”
“That must have been interesting.”
“Oddly enough, it was.” Gregor hadn’t bothered to button his coat when he left the Cavern. Now he shrugged it off and draped it over the chair. “You ever do any business with Cary Alder?”
“No,” Ed said. “This is an old-line firm. He’s a little too—”
“New?”
“Crooked,” Ed said. “I’m not saying I know anything specifically, but there are people around here with connections. The word is the Feds are about to land on him with both feet.”
“That’s what I hear, too. I think that’s what he hears, too. Do you know the case that just came up? The woman in the garbage bag, and then the man they found dead in her apartment?”
“I know about the woman in the garbage bag,” Ed said. “It’s been all over the news.”
“Did you know she had Aldergold on her when she was found? Do you know what Aldergold is?”
“Aldergold is the kind of thing that makes this firm not want to deal with Cary Alder,” Ed said. “I had heard about that. But I thought the woman was supposed to be some kind of bag lady. How did she get Aldergold?”
“Cary Alder gave it to her. It’s a long story. She’s not a bag lady and she’s not a highflier, but the police found the stuff and so we’re talking to Cary Alder. But forget that for a minute. I’ll tell you about it later if you want me to, but it’s not what has me up here. Alder said something to me that’s sticking in my head. Do you do any criminal law?”
“Pro bono, but some,” Ed said. “Not on Cary Alder’s level. The firm gets involved in some of that kind of thing. You can’t help it when you’re dealing with people who make lots of money. Making lots of money makes people truly stupid.”
“I can bet. Alder said to me, sort of as an aside, that when there’s a big money case like that, when everything starts going south, it isn’t just the top guys who get hit. A lot of their employees get hit, too. Get arrested, I think he meant. And prosecuted and put in jail. Even if they weren’t necessarily doing anything illegal.”
“Ah,” Ed said. “Well, you got that wrong just a bit. They’ll have been doing something illegal, they just won’t necessarily have known it was illegal. Money cases are not like murders.”
“I wouldn’t expect them to be.”
“Financial law is a rat’s nest, in a lot of ways. Remember some time back, when Martha Stewart went to prison? You read the newspapers, you’d think she went to jail because she engaged in insider trading. But she didn’t. They couldn’t convict her on insider trading. What she went to jail for was telling her stockholders that she expected to be acquitted of insider trading.”
“And that was against the law? Even though she was right?”
“Exactly.”
“Okay,” Gregor said. “Things have changed a bit since my day.”
“It’s stuff like that that makes all the complications,” Ed said. “Let’s go back to Cary Alder. What I’ve been hearing is bank fraud, connected to some building projects he’s got going. That almost certainly means he’s got a connection at one or more banks. Each of those connections has to be high enough up in the hierarchy to approve a loan, and with enough clout to hide the transactions that need to be hidden. That could be one of the top guys, and sometimes it is, but it also could be somebody a couple of rungs down the ladder. In that latter case, the people above that connection are going to be on the hook at least partway, because the Feds expect them to know. But you’ve also got the people right below the connection. Almost certainly one of them is going to have done the actual physical moving of the money, and that’s going to be a crime even if the guy who did it had no idea he shouldn’t have been doing it. His boss said to do it. He did it.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“The same is going to be true at Alder’s own company,” Ed said. “I suppose Alder could be altering documents and sending falsified financial statements with his own two hands, but I’d bet not. He’s got somebody, maybe even several somebodies, doing something like inflating his rent receipts, maybe, or overestimating the market value of his holdings. Remember the savings and loan debacle? I think we’re talking about Reagan. A guy would come in and take out a mortgage to buy property for a hundred dollars. A few weeks later, another guy would come in and take out a mortgage to buy that property from him for a thousand dollars. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until there was some two-acre little sand plot mortgaged for millions of bucks, and then the scammers would disappear. Well, every time they did that flip, there was some second assistant bookkeeper actually doing the paperwork. And that guy got charged along with the rest of them.”
Gregor thought this over. “So Cary Alder has a second assistant bookkeeper on the hook somewhere.”
“He does, and whoever he has in with him at the banks probably does, too.”
“And what happens to the second assistant bookkeepers when the case blows up?”
“Depends on what the second assistant bookkeepers did,” Ed said. “And what they did and didn’t know. And just how furious the prosecutors are.”
Gregor sighed. Second assistant bookkeepers. Bank fraud that the banks participated in. He didn’t believe that Cary Alder had himself stuffed Marta Warkowski into a garbage bag, and he didn’t believe he had gotten Hernandez to do it and then shot Hernandez in Marta Warkowski’s apartment. In fact, Gregor had the impression that not only did Cary Alder know the Feds were about to land on him, but that he wasn’t trying very hard to get out from under it. It didn’t make any sense.
“You ever see a man who’s about to be hit by a freight train and just doesn’t care?”
“I know enough about Cary Alder to know you don’t want to get too involved with him,” Ed said. “What I know may be secondhand, but everybody says the same things, and my guess is that means the things are true. He’s a liar. He’s a cheat. He’s a con man. And he is going to go down, sooner rather than later.”
“And all of that may be true,” Gregor said, “but I don’t think he’s a murderer. I don’t even think he paid a murderer. And that puts me in a very uncomfortable position.”