The Man Who Came Uptown

Eleven

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.