Gregor Demarkian had always thought that life in the District of Columbia changed people more than life in other places did. It had changed him, when he was with the FBI. He had come to the Bureau thinking he knew something about corruption. He had spent an inordinate amount of time taking courses in the then-new field of forensic accounting, and he had been a witness to the politics of Philadelphia all of his life. Then he’d run into his very first congressman on the take, and he’d never felt the same way about arithmetic again.
The District of Columbia had changed John Jackman, too. At the moment, this was most obvious in the way the man held himself. He looked as if nothing had ever made him feel insecure, ever. He looked as if he had emerged from the womb in complete control of his world and the universe it was in. This was not true, but Gregor was not going to remind him of it.
The meeting turned out to be in Jackman’s constituent office in downtown Philadelphia. It was a small suite of rooms on the ground floor of a building near Independence Hall. It didn’t look as if it were used much. Jackman himself was standing next to a window that looked out on a street that ran along the side of the building. The other man—the Philadelphia commissioner of police, Gregor supposed—was sitting in an armchair near the desk.
“You have the oddest look on your face,” Jackman said, as Gregor walked in.
“I was thinking of what it was like when I first joined the FBI,” Gregor said. “Did you know that in those days, if you wanted to be a special agent, you had to be a lawyer or an accountant? I don’t think they do that anymore.”
“Which were you?” Jackman asked.
“I was an accountant,” Gregor said. “And no, I couldn’t do your taxes. I can’t even do my own.”
The other man had stood up. He was enormous in both height and bulk. The black skin on his head shone as if he’d polished it.
“Gregor Demarkian,” John Jackman said. “This is Michael Washington.”
Michael Washington held out his hand. Gregor shook it.
“You’re an accountant?” Michael Washington said. “I thought John said something about serial killers.”
“The Behavioral Sciences Unit,” Gregor said. “I spent the last ten years of my career setting that up and running it. You had to be a lawyer or an accountant to get hired. That didn’t mean they used you as a lawyer or an accountant.”
“I was telling Mike that the BSU is practically the only part of the FBI that deals with murders,” John said.
“They don’t call it the BSU anymore,” Gregor said. “I think the initials got to them. But, yes, murder is almost always a state crime. The BSU was founded to deal with the reality that serial killers often operate in more than one state. Some of them operate in four or five states. It helps to have something that can connect it all up.”
Michael Washington looked slightly confused, but he didn’t ask any more questions. Instead, he sat back down.
John Jackman waved Gregor to one of the other chairs and came away from the window to sit at the desk.
“I told Mike here that you weren’t going to hold a grudge against the Philadelphia police for arresting Russ Donahue, but he wanted to be sure,” John said. “And I wanted to be sure that we could look into all parts of this situation without letting the cat out of the bag. We need someone who can investigate something without letting anyone know what he’s really investigating.”
“You need to investigate a murder without letting anyone know you’re investigating a murder,” Gregor said.
“It’s not a murder,” Mike Washington said. “At least not yet.”
“And murder or assault, that part of it is secondary,” John said.
“All right,” Gregor said. “Let’s say it’s an assault. What assault?”
“The woman dumped in the garbage bag last night,” John said.
Gregor shook his head. “You realize I wasn’t actually there. Tibor and Tommy were on the scene accidentally and Tibor called me to come hold his hand. I didn’t see the incident. I have no idea what went on.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Mike Washington said. “The thing with the garbage bag is an accident, really. If it wasn’t for the Aldergold, we wouldn’t have thought to connect up the two. But now we’ve got this thing, and we can’t let it go.”
“Do you know who Cary Alder is?” John Jackman asked.
“Sure,” Gregor said. “It’s hard to miss him. Alder Properties. Great big high-rise monstrosities all tricked out in gold paint.”
“Right,” John said. “Except there’s a lot more to Alder Properties than that. They own more than a dozen buildings in Philadelphia, and most of them are not high end. The company was started by Alder’s father, and it was started the way a lot of these things are. You buy the building you’re living in. You put some of the money you make from that aside and buy another building. If you’re good at it and you’re ambitious, you get bigger and bigger buildings in better and better neighborhoods, and eventually you get Alder Tower.”
“And you think Cary Alder has something to do with the woman in the garbage bag?”
“We don’t know,” Michael Washington said.
“We think Cary Alder is bribing the mayor and half the building inspectors in the city,” John said, “but there’s nothing all that odd about that. At least half these guys do it. They see it as part of the price of doing business. What has me here is that we’re pretty sure he’s also paying off his congressman, and nobody knows why.”
Gregor considered this. “That really is a job for the FBI.”
“They’re on it,” John said.
“Then I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“We were kind of hoping you could consult on the case of the woman in the garbage bag,” Michael Washington said. “And, you know, keep your eyes open. For whatever it is. We don’t know what it is. We just know it isn’t drugs.”
John Jackman reached into the pocket of his jacket and came out with a gold coin the size of an Olympic medal. “Ever seen one of those?”
Gregor took the coin. “No. What is it?”
“It’s Aldergold,” John Jackman said. “There are half a dozen places in this city, owned and operated by Alder Properties, where those things are the only legal tender. You can’t go up to the bar and take out your wallet. You have to have those. And you use them just like cash. But first you have to get them. Not everybody can get them. You have to rent one of Alder’s more expensive apartments, or be one of Alder’s big customers in that place he’s got in Atlantic City. There are probably a couple of other ways, or Alder could just give them to you. But the point is, they aren’t easy to get, and not everybody can get them.”
“And this has something to do with the woman in the garbage bag, how?” Gregor asked.
Michael Washington shifted his bulk in the chair.
“When they got her to the hospital and started to go through the things she had on her,” he said, “she didn’t have a wallet, she didn’t have money, she didn’t have identification, she didn’t have anything. But she did have fifteen of those.”
They wanted to get him out of the building without being seen by reporters, although Gregor didn’t see why that should be an issue. No one knew he was there, and no one knew the police commissioner and the senator cared one way or the other about the woman in the garbage bag.
“You’re something of a public figure,” John Jackman said by way of explanation.
It wasn’t much of an explanation, but Gregor let it ride and installed himself in the reception room to make some phone calls. He hadn’t asked about the elephant in the middle of the room, and for the moment he didn’t want to. At some point, though, he was going to have to know what was going on with the mayor. It was the mayor he would have expected to find at this meeting, whether Michael Washington was there or not. Instead, the mayor was nowhere to be seen, and anytime anyone mentioned him they made little coughing noises, as if they were strangling.
Gregor called Bennis first.
“I’m filling out forms,” she said, when she picked up. “There are a lot of forms.”
“Is Ed still there?”
“No, he left almost as soon as he got here. He showed me where the little Xs were that mean we’re supposed to sign, and where the little check marks were that mean we’re supposed to initial. I’m leaving all the signing and initialing until you get here. We both have to do those.”
“Where’s Javier?”
“Sitting here with Pickles and a coloring book and a plate of those Armenian almond cookies Lida makes that I like. Lida and Hannah were here. I told you they were coming. They dropped off boxes. I put the chocolate chip up in a cabinet where Javier can’t get to it.”
“Javier isn’t supposed to have chocolate chip cookies?”
“Javier can have them all he wants, but chocolate is a poison for dogs. And Javier feeds Pickles everything. I think Pickles got more breakfast than I did. She certainly got more bacon.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. “Listen, do you want me to bring something home? I don’t know what we’re doing about dinner, unless you mean to get the Ararat to send something in again. Or you want to go out. And I don’t know when I’m going to get back to you.”
“We’ll be fine. I’ll think of something. We do have food in this house.”
“I know. Don’t mind me.”
“Is it at least something interesting, what you’re doing?”
“It’s about that woman Tibor and Tommy found yesterday.”
“Really.”
“I’d better tell you about this when I get home,” Gregor said. “Let me get off and see if I can find out what’s going on. Or not.”
“I have cold cuts for lunch.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Gregor closed down. The building around him was very quiet. The rooms that comprised John’s offices were even quieter. He opened the contacts list on his phone and scrolled through it. When he found what he was looking for, he considered for one last time and then punched it in.
Drew Tackerby picked up himself. Gregor had called his private cell phone, not anything connected to Drew’s office.
“It’s Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.
“Gregor Demarkian on my private line,” Drew said. “Why do I think I’m going to regret this?”
Drew had a desk job now. It had taken him five years longer than it had Gregor to get out of the field, but Drew had not been as determined as Gregor to get out. Greg couldn’t remember what Drew’s title was these days.
“I’ll admit,” Gregor said. “I was a little afraid you’d retired.”
“End of the year. What is it you want me to do?”
“Get me some information. I don’t think it’s top secret, classified information.”
“Information about what?”
“I want to know if the Bureau is investigating my congressman.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “As far as I can tell at the moment, nobody here seems to know. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. In my day, the Bureau didn’t open investigations into United States congressmen willy-nilly.”
“In J. Edgar’s day,” Drew started.
“I know,” Gregor said. “But we’re past all that, and there’s something about this that just feels all wrong. Whatever it is that’s going on has to do with a local guy, a real estate developer, named Cary Alder.”
“Bingo,” Drew said. “You just said the magic words.”
“Cary Alder?”
“He’s not as local as you think,” Drew said. “He operates in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida. Which means what he does crosses state lines, so the Bureau can investigate him.”
“So you’re investigating him. For what?”
“You want a list? Bank fraud, including international bank fraud. That’s a good one. Bribery. The guy’s absolutely bribing a couple of mayors. Unfortunately, he’s more intelligent at it than a lot of people are. We aren’t going to get lucky and find a freezer full of money in anybody’s basement.”
“So you’re going to arrest him?”
“Not right away,” Drew said. “Here’s the thing. Bank fraud and bribery? All these guys do it to one extent or another. We follow what they’re doing until we hit something we can really nail them for, which is harder than you’d think. In Cary Alder’s case, something else looks like it’s going on, but it’s not clear what. And the problem with that is that the whatever it is might not even be illegal. People hide parts of their lives for lots of different reasons, not all of them connected with the criminal justice system.”
“That’s what they’re saying up here,” Gregor said. “This is the part that sounds all wrong to me.”
“I can put you in touch with the guy who’s in charge of that investigation,” Drew said. “He won’t mind talking to you. Especially if you’re investigating Alder yourself for some reason. Are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You sound just as coherent as the rest of us,” Drew said. “But let me have Judson Tallirico call you. He might not be able to get back to you until this evening, but it’s like I said. He’ll be glad to talk to you. And I’ll run in to him around here sometime today.”
“I take it Virginia hasn’t had the ice storm to end all ice storms.”
“Nothing close.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Have him call me at this number around nine o’clock tonight, if that’s possible. I ought to be completely free and clear by then.”
Gregor hung up. John’s offices were still quiet. The building around them was still quiet.
Everything was quiet, except that somebody had dumped a woman in a garbage bag on an iced-over city street.
When Michael Washington reappeared, he was alone and carrying a large, black zip folder. He looked sweaty and tired, as if the smallest amount of exertion wore him out.
Gregor stood up and took the zip folder. It weighed a ton.
“It’s everything we have on Alder,” Washington said. “The good, the bad, and the inexplicable.”
“I think it’s interesting you’re willing to say there’s something good about Alder.”
Washington shrugged. “I’m not one of those people who has some vision in the sky about perfection and thinks everything else is crap. It would be nice if every building with low-cost housing in it looked like the Bellagio and ran like the Waldorf Astoria, but they don’t. It would be nicer if public housing was fit habitation for children, but it isn’t. We have a million people in this city who have to live somewhere. It seems like almost all the people willing to provide them with a place to stay are more like Cary Alder than they are like Saint Michael the Archangel.”
“So you don’t really want to arrest Alder?”
“Oh, we want to arrest him, all right. His operations are getting more out of hand by the minute and the secret thing is driving us all nuts. And then there’s the servants’ entrance thing. That got up everybody’s nose.”
“What’s the servants’ entrance thing?”
“It was when John was still mayor,” Washington said. “He got the idea from New York. Always a bad sign to me, the idea comes from New York. Anyway, we’ve got height restrictions on new construction and a lot of the developers don’t like it. The lower they have to stay, the fewer the apartments they can build on the same lot. Luxury apartments, you know. Anyway, there was this thing in New York where they’d give you permission to build a higher high-rise if you included a certain percentage of ‘affordable’ apartments in the same building. Affordable. Jesus. Two thousand dollars for a postage stamp.”
“Are we that expensive here?”
“No,” Washington said. “I think that’s why John thought he could get away with it. He could make the guys provide actually affordable apartments, if you see what I mean.”
“For poor people.”
“That was the idea,” Washington said. “So John put the idea out there to a couple of guys who had applications in to build, but most of them weren’t interested. I was an old man before I realized most people are a lot more interested in status than they are in money. Oh, not people like Cary Alder. I mean the people they sell and rent to. This really isn’t New York. In New York, just being in Manhattan is enough to give you a shine. Here, you’ve got to have visible signs of exclusivity. The developers were all worried that nobody would buy a luxury apartment in a building that also had affordable apartments in it.”
“Except for Cary Alder.”
“Yeah. John should have known better. He’s a smart man, and he’s been around. But he didn’t. The shoe didn’t drop until the building opened. When it did, it turned out that Alder had built those affordable apartments, but to get to them you had to go to a separate entrance. They were totally sealed off from the rest of the building. You couldn’t go in the front door. You had to go around to the back. The separate entrance wasn’t even on the same street. You wouldn’t even have the same address as the rich part of the building. And the front entrance had a doorman. The back entrance didn’t.”
“Seriously,” Gregor said. “It sounds like some Thirties movie. And people put up with this?”
“The people who took the apartments didn’t have a choice,” Washington said. “They were placed there by the social services departments. John had a world-class hissy fit, but there wasn’t anything he could do. It was, though, the last building that got built that way in Philadelphia. John tried to impose conditions that would eliminate the backdoor thing, but under those conditions nobody was willing to bite.”
“Because the people in the luxury apartments are more interested in status than money,” Gregor said.
“And they don’t want to know that the poor people even exist,” Washington said. “But it’s more complicated than that, at least for me. My father had a three-story stacker out in Lansdowne. We lived in the top floor and rented out the two floors beneath us. We rented to people more or less as poor as we were ourselves. You may not believe this, Mr. Demarkian, but it’s expensive to rent to poor people. Most poor people are fine, you know, but even the good ones have money problems and can’t pay the rent. The others will kill you. They break things. They get hyped up on alcohol and drugs and wreck the place. There are domestic disputes and the cops get called. The rent on those other two apartments paid our mortgage. It got hard sometimes to make that mortgage payment.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “I can see that.”
“You can see it, but you’ve got to think it through,” Washington said. “It can be hard to make enough money to keep a place running when you’re renting affordable apartments. That’s why the services in those places are so bad. Some cities put up all kinds of regulations demanding that every building have this service or that service, and then it gets to be impossible to run those kinds of buildings and make them pay at all. Then you lose small owner-occupied buildings, which is too bad, because conditions are better for everybody when the owner lives there, too. If you jack up the regulations high enough, you start to lose the corporate-operated ones, too. And every building you lose, every rental unit that disappears from the market, means another guy out on the street in the winter weather. And not just guys.”
“I take it there isn’t enough public housing to carry them,” Gregor said.
“No sane person wants to live in public housing if they can help it,” Washington said. “And no sane person wants to bring up children there. But it’s more than that. Undocumented immigrants can’t get into public housing.”
“At all?”
“If there’s a member of the family that’s here legally, or a citizen, that person can get into public housing and bring some of the undocumented family with them. That happens sometimes. But this is a city with a big undocumented population. ICE has practically taken up residence downtown. We had a raid in North Philadelphia that cleared out eight hundred people in a single day. And maybe those people shouldn’t be here and we can take up that argument another day, but a lot of those people are children. And I don’t want to see children sleeping in the parks when it’s seventeen below.”
“So you put up with Cary Alder,” Gregor said.
“So I won’t say there’s nothing good to say about Cary Alder,” Washington corrected. “He serves a purpose. Until we can find a way to provide better housing to more people, people like him are going to be necessary to keep people off the streets. And I’m not looking at a world where we’re going to find a way to provide better housing any time soon.”
“Are you sure you want me to find out what the man is doing?”
Michael Washington sighed. The air came up out of the middle of him in a gigantic wave, so that he inflated and deflated like a bellows.
“Yes,” he said. “Because I’m with John. There’s something going on there that’s weirder than a grade-B horror movie plot, and I don’t like the way it makes me feel.”