The Man Who Came Uptown
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-47982-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Man Who Came Uptown». Краткое содержание книги:
Still, she was restless. It wasn’t the neighborhood; it was marriage. Rick himself was not the problem. He was smart, funny, a gentleman, and attractive in a dark Irish way. They were friends and, so far, good partners, and they were fine in bed. Rick touched all the bases, though he was somewhat of a technician and there was a sameness to his moves. She came infrequently but that’s what her vibrator was for. She loved him. She got that “now it’s all right” feeling when he walked into a room.
The conventions of marriage were what gave her pause. The expected milestones and progressions. Wedding ceremony, home ownership, kids, colleges, empty nest, retirement, death. The step 1, step 2, step 3 of it that, when she thought of it, bored her to tears. And then she’d laugh at herself when she questioned these things. She was married to a good man. She didn’t want to be alone.
Rick came home from work after her, as he always did. He was wearing a navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit and a blue-and-red rep tie. He called it the uniform of his law firm. Rick was handsome in a grown-man way, changed from the shaggy, bearded look he’d carried off effortlessly when they first met at Emerson. When they’d go out to see bands, and she’d stand close to him in clubs, the heat radiated between them. Now he barely listened to music anymore. In his free time, he ran and played golf.
“Hey,” he said. Rick embraced her and they kissed. “Good day?”
“Yes. I’m gonna take a ride, okay?”
“Sure. I’ll have a run and meet you back here in, what, an hour or so?”
“Okay.”
“We can grab some dinner out.”
“Great.”
He kissed her again. “You look good. Really good.”
She was wearing shorts over spandex, a D.C. stars-and-bars T-shirt from Bureau, a skate shop on U Street, and shoes with steel shanks. “You’re quick with the compliments tonight.”
“That’s ’cause I want something.”
“Hmm.”
She climbed onto her Cannondale road bike and pedaled down the steep hill of Georgia, past the Banneker public pool where she swam during lap time in the summer months. She was hurtling straight down the edge of the Piedmont Plateau, and it would be a bitch to return on, but it was a good hard way to end a ride. She’d go downtown to the Mall and if she was ambitious, she’d do the loop at Hains Point, then come back home. They’d shower and maybe walk over to Eleventh Street to one of those restaurant/bars, then come back to the house and watch some Netflix, and at the end of the night they’d make love, that “something” he’d mentioned. It would be a good night. And, also, routine.
Pedaling hard, she thought of work, as she tended to do while on her rides. The Mental Health unit was on the schedule for the next day, and its inmates had different needs and presented different challenges than those on the other blocks. She had staged them earlier in the afternoon and would make some additions the next morning. And then she thought about Gen Pop, which would meet the following day, and what those men would need. That guy Donnell, crafty and smart, and the born-again Christian who looked at her in ways she could not decipher, and Michael Hudson... but oh, yeah, Michael, one of her favorite clients, was no longer in the unit. One day he simply wasn’t there. She didn’t know if he had transitioned to a federal facility or if he’d been released.
This was something she had gotten used to. The jail held pretrial felons, pretrial misdemeanants, and sentenced misdemeanants. It wasn’t a prison. No one stayed too long. She got comfortable with being around many of these men, and in some cases she looked forward to seeing them. And then they were gone.
She wondered about Michael. She hoped he’d landed well.
Eight
The Weitzman residence was in Potomac, Maryland, off of Falls Road, in a neighborhood of split-level and Colonial homes built in the 1970s. By modern standards, the lots and structures were modest, none approaching the large acreage and square footage of houses in places like Howard County and in communities like McLean, across the river. But the big-ticket imports in the driveways and the highly rated public schools in the zip code told a story of quiet wealth.
Phil Ornazian was seated in a small room off the kitchen, his notebook, pen, and a glass of water before him, talking to Leonard Weitzman, sitting across the table from him. Weitzman’s wife, Diane, sat on a stool in the kitchen at a kind of breakfast bar, having a glass of chardonnay. She was within earshot of the conversation but had elected to situate herself away from the men.
“Where’d you two go that weekend?” said Ornazian.
“The Hyatt down in Cambridge,” said Weitzman. “On the Eastern Shore. Just Diane and me. We like to get away when we can.”
“Do you play golf?” The resort featured an eighteen-hole course overlooking the Choptank River.
“I don’t go down there for that,” said Weitzman. “We go because Diane likes the atmosphere.”
“They have wonderful spa facilities,” said Diane.
“But you play,” said Ornazian to Weitzman.
“Sure,” said Weitzman, and then, offhandedly, “I’m at Congressional.”
The initiation fee at Congressional Country Club was in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It told Ornazian, and the world, that Weitzman had fuck-you money. Also, Weitzman, a Jew, had elected to join Congressional over Woodmont, the traditional Jewish club on Rockville Pike, whose initiation fee, eighty K, was considerably less. Ornazian didn’t know what any of this meant, but, as he had always been outside the tent of money and power, he found it interesting.
“In retrospect,” said Weitzman, “I wish we hadn’t left Lisa here alone that weekend. We’ve done it before, but that was when her older brother lived here.”
“Richard’s away at Penn State,” said Diane.
“She never gave us any reason to distrust her,” said Weitzman, who put up his hands as if in surrender. “She never did anything like this.”
That you know of, thought Ornazian. He had read up on Weitzman, who was a highly compensated chief counsel complete with stock options for a large tech company on the I-270 corridor. Weitzman might have been in denial about his daughter, or perhaps he was simply being defensive about his absence on the weekend in question, but he was a man in his fifties who had raised two teenagers, and he couldn’t have been naive.
Leonard Weitzman was an average-size man with the normal weight issues of the middle-aged. He probably went to the gym regularly, but he was losing the fight. His scalp was visible through his thinning hair. At seven in the evening, he was still wearing work clothes, and they were expensive. An Armani tie, Gucci horse-bit loafers, a fine-fabric suit. Ornazian guessed he favored the Saks men’s store over Nordstrom and that a clothier with a Brit accent picked out Weitzman’s threads in advance of his visit. Ornazian was projecting, but some version of that scenario had to be true.
His wife, Diane, short and sturdy, was put together nicely. Her clothing was up to the minute and her hair was stylishly cut. She had all the looks and upkeep that money could buy, but tonight the blur of alcohol and undisguised stress was in her eyes.