PHIL ORNAZIAN sat on the second-floor sleeper porch of his house, alternately working and looking out over the yards backing to the red-brick alley running behind Taylor. He had brought an old Ikea desk and chair out onto the porch, which served as his office for half the year, though mostly he worked out of his car. The walls of the porch had removable glass panels that he replaced with screens in the spring. Sometimes, on summer nights, he and Sydney slept out here on a futon he’d purchased in his bachelor days. Sometimes he’d let the boys join them in their sleeping bags. The porch had closed the deal for him when he’d first looked at the house.
He had been on his laptop for most of the morning, studying Facebook pages and then using his own people-finder program to locate the participants of the Weitzman party. Lisa had announced the party as a private event rather than a public event. That meant it didn’t go out to the world at large but still reached her friends who could telephone it to acquaintances and strangers. There had been much chatter on her page in anticipation of the party, with many replies. Lisa had opened the doors unwittingly to bad people, but her move had also given Ornazian plenty of information to seek out the offenders. He’d made a couple of phone calls and he’d spent some time on the DC.gov website and did a search on its real property tax database. He used school-group pages and the process of elimination when common names occurred, and after several hours on his laptop he had compiled a working list of contacts, focusing on those he thought he could squeeze. He had what he needed now to start.
Ornazian sat back in his chair. The roof of the small garage at the edge of his yard, which he used as a workshop, was covered in autumn’s fallen leaves. He’d need to get out back and clear it. Also trim the rosebushes and turn the soil in Sydney’s vegetable garden in prep for her annual planting. Shovel up the minefield of dog poop that had accumulated in the yard. But first he had to fill the house checkbook. That was priority one.
One of his dogs barked loudly, and Ornazian said, “Hey.” Blue and Whitey, lazily named for the color of their coats, sat by the rear screens looking out at the yard. They were pit-bull mixes adopted from the Humane Rescue Alliance across from the big community garden off Blair Road. Sixty- or seventy-pound bitches, still in their relative youth, mostly muscle. They’d been with him all morning. They liked to come out here and study the many dogs in the neighboring yards down in the alley. Ornazian wondered if they dreamed of playing with them or of tearing them apart.
Sydney appeared in the doorway. She was wearing black tights under a denim shirt. Her hair was in short twists. She was unkempt and she looked lovely.
“Can the boys come out, love?” she said. “They’ve been dying to.”
“Sure. I’m done for now.”
Presently his sons, Gregg and Vic, rushed out onto the porch. Both of them had gotten their feet into Ornazian’s shoes and were wearing them clumsily. Their hair was curly and their skin tone was a shade lighter than their mother’s. They both had Sydney’s big brown eyes.
“Careful,” said Ornazian as Gregg, the elder at four and a half, tripped and held on to his father’s arm. Vic, the more coordinated of the two, younger than Gregg by fourteen months, had swaggered into the room more smoothly.
The dogs got up and walked around the boys in a circling-the-wagons move. Then Whitey, as she tended to do, sat down with her body leaned against Sydney’s leg, always her protector.
“Bang-bang,” said Vic, pistoling his hand and pointing it at his father.
“Victor,” said Sydney. “You know what we say about guns.”
“Yeah, Vic,” said Ornazian, without conviction. He had a trigger-locked .38 in the nightstand by his bed, registered and legal due to his CCW, the license to carry in the District. He also owned a pump-action Remington, not legal, which he kept unloaded and leaning against the wall of his closet behind his hanging shirts. He hoped to never use either of them. But if anyone entered his home and came up to the second floor, where his family slept, he would.
The entrance of the kids and the excitation of the dogs told Ornazian that he wouldn’t be getting any meaningful work done. His cell phone, set behind his laptop, lit up with a message. Sydney read the message over his shoulder without guilt. It was from a woman named Monique. The message was wordless and consisted only of two symbols: a dollar sign and a question mark.
“One of your whores?” said Sydney.
“She’d probably prefer that you call her an escort.”
“What’s a whore, Dad?” said Gregg.
“A lady who works very hard.”
“Like Mum?”
Ornazian pocketed his cell and stood up. “I’ve got to go.”
“Aren’t you going to answer your son?” said Sydney.
He kissed her mouth. “Gonna be out for the rest of the day. I’ll stay in touch.”
ON MONIQUE’S old Backpage listing, recently taken down, her photos showed her mostly from the rear, bending over a bed, displaying her ample behind in a thong, or in obstructed profile, pinching the elongated nipples of her breasts. Listed along with her measurements was a menu of her services, vaguely but cleverly described; the ad noted that she was available for out-call dates and that she accepted tips. She had a nice face, if one was not turned off by large features, so she was not hiding her grille out of shame or for deception but rather to conceal her identity. In addition to working as a prostitute, Monique had a straight job. She was one of the nice-looking, put-together women who worked the makeup counters at the high-end department stores clustered on Wisconsin Avenue in Friendship Heights. There were others like her in those same kinds of positions, living two lives.
Ornazian and Monique were seated at the bar of Matisse, a French restaurant on Wisconsin and Fessenden that was a quiet, refined spot for locals. Monique was having a glass of dry white wine. Ornazian stuck with water. He had passed her an envelope containing one thousand dollars in cash soon after they arrived.
“You made me ask for it,” said Monique.
“I wasn’t holding out on you. I’ve been busy.”
“How’d Theodore take it?”
“Like a man. But he talked too much.”
“Sounds like him. His silver tongue is forked, but that’s how he gets his women.”
“You know Theodore means ‘God’s gift,’” said Ornazian. “It’s from the Greek.”
“Hmph,” said Monique.
Monique was wearing all black, the uniform for her day job, and she was perfectly made up, befitting her job as a specialist. She was on her lunch break and not far from the store. Ornazian asked her how it was going for her since the government had pressured Backpage to remove its escort listings.
“I’m up on another site,” said Monique. “Ain’t no thing to me. Always gonna be a market for what I do and a way for men to find me.”
“You still working the clubs?”
“VIP rooms only,” she said. “Everything’s cool.”
She had started as a dancer in the topless club on New York Avenue, near the dog shelter, which had once been the most bumping spot of its kind in D.C. She was out-call exclusively now, and she had no pimp. In her world, she had moved way up.
“I might have something for you,” said Monique. “Could be good.”
“Talk about it.”
“Girl I work with up at the makeup counter? Beautiful girl, goes by Lourdes? Used to work the houses but got herself out. She got a friend named Marisol who’s in a brothel in Columbia Heights, near a bar owned by this dude Gustav.”
“You saying Gustav owns the brothel too.”
“Right.”
“What’s the story with Marisol?”
“She was trafficked. Got sold to a recruiter in Guatemala and then smuggled into America, same trail they use for guns and drugs. She working off her debt now in that brothel in Columbia Heights.”
“And?”
“I told my friend Lourdes about you. Not by name, understand. And she told her girl Marisol. Marisol wants to speak to you. This dude Gustav is a real entrepreneur. Owns a house-painting business and a little jewelry store in Langley Park. Lourdes say it’s one of those stores that never seems to have a customer in it.”
“So Gustav is laundering cash through his other businesses.”
“That’s right.”
“Is it okay if I contact Marisol?”
“She’ll contact you. I’ll give her your number if that’s cool.”
“It is.”
“And if this pans out, there’s something in it for me, right?”
“Something. Not a grand, though.”
“You’ll take care of me, Phil.” Monique checked her watch and drained her wineglass. “You always been a gentleman.”
ORNAZIAN SAT in his Edge in the neighborhood of Deanwood in Far Northeast, where brick apartment buildings mingled with houses in varying conditions on large lots. Deanwood’s residents were urban in appearance but the atmosphere had a southern, country vibe. There were smokers and barbecue grills out in the yards, and men worked on their own cars here. Deanwood folks had been keeping chickens long before it became a suburban trend, and one man owned a goat. Ornazian was on the high ground, on Jay Street and Forty-Seventh. The hilly terrain with its view of the federal city was typical of D.C.’s eastern quadrants.
He was waiting for Christopher Perry, an attendee at the Weitzman party, to come back from school. Woodson High’s day had ended a half an hour earlier and Ornazian was hoping to catch Perry as he arrived at his house, half of a ramshackle duplex that stood at the top of the hill. Ornazian knew a Woodson math teacher who had once been in a band, which was not an unusual progression for the Positive Force crowd. After assurances that Ornazian was not going to jam the kid up, the teacher had given him the name of the street on which Perry stayed, but he stopped short of giving him an address. A real property tax database search confirmed that a house on Jay Street was owned by a Debra Perry, Christopher’s mother or grandmother.
Ornazian was about to give up and hit the ignition button when Christopher Perry appeared, walking east on Jay with a book bag slung over his shoulder. His face was an approximate match to the photo that appeared on his Facebook page. Ornazian got out of his car and crossed the street. Perry, a big kid, eyed him mildly and without concern and kept walking. Ornazian was obviously off his turf. Deanwood and its adjacent neighborhood Burrville had yet to gentrify.
“Christopher Perry?” said Ornazian.
“Yeah?” Perry stopped walking and dropped his book bag, freeing his arms. It was what Ornazian would have done.
Ornazian had drawn his wallet and opened it to show Perry his license. “Phil Ornazian. I’m an investigator.”
Unlike many who accepted the deliberately vague title of investigator, Perry studied the license before Ornazian closed his wallet.
“You’re not MPD,” said Perry.
“Private.”
“So I don’t have to talk to you.”
“Let me ask you one question,” said Ornazian. “You went to a party in Potomac, Maryland, recently.”
“So?”
“The house got robbed of some valuable jewelry that night. A girl was sexually assaulted.”
This caught his attention. He looked a bit surprised.
“You had a question?” said Perry.
“You know anything about that?” said Ornazian. “You were there with a friend, right?”
“Me and my boy had nothing to do with it.”
“I didn’t say you did. I’m just wondering if you saw anything. I’m working for the man who owns the house.”
Perry shrugged. “We just went out there for fun. See if we could talk to some girls. Trust me, I wouldn’t do it again.”
“Why not?”
“Those people were acting stupid. Rich kids all trying to be like Gucci Mane and shit, sippin that Drank.”
“You don’t use it?”
“Nah, I don’t mess with it. It’ll do you permanent. Pimp C died behind it. Thing was, the kids at that party was actin more fucked up than they was.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The dudes who brought the Lean, the ones who was sellin it? They were runnin a game.”
“Who were they?”
“Three older white dudes, inked up. The guy I was with—”
“What’s his name?”
“Nah. Uh-uh.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“My friend looked at one of the prescription bottles they brought in with them,” said Perry. “They had taken a needle and syringed out some of the medicine. Probably replaced it with NyQuil or some shit like that.”
“So they were cutting it. How do you know?”
“There was a burn mark on the bottle, where they had sealed the hole back up with fire. We know what that’s about. But those kids out there in that fancy neighborhood don’t know shit.”
“Were these older guys the same ones who trashed the house?”
“Tellin you, I don’t know. Me and my boy, we left out of there early.”
“Why?”
“Those guys who brought the Lean were mean-muggin us. Calling us lawn jockeys and shit like that. Didn’t care if we heard it either.”
Ornazian considered that. It fit the profile, given what he had seen carved into the table at the Weitzman home.
“So you ghosted.”
“We were outnumbered. Besides, I wanted to get back to a party I knew about in Northeast. Hang with my own.”
Ornazian thought of his sons and what they would be facing in the world as they came of age. For a moment, he considered making an apology to Christopher Perry, even knowing how lame and ineffective it would be. But Perry had already picked up his book bag and was walking toward his home.