In This Rain (25 page)

She waited in a polished-stone lobby and was carried up in a stainless-steel elevator that might as well have been a Star Fleet transporter. She imagined it disassembling her molecules, shooting them in a speed-of-light beam into an identical pod on the thirty-fourth floor for reassembly. Though she’d always had a suspicion that wasn’t how those things would work: they wouldn’t reassemble you, they’d record you and, using elements found at the place you wanted to be, they’d re-create you. It would be easier that way, and you’d be always new, always made of the place where you were.

And always destroyed, over and over, as you left the place you’d come from.

When the doors opened Ann’s first thought was that the beam must have been aimed at the wrong planet. Or the wrong century. After the sleek stone lobby and silent steel elevator, what was this rich patterned carpet, this mahogany furniture, this crystal chandelier? But between oddly proportioned wood columns with fanciful capitals, gilded letters spelled out HENRY M. MARTIN AND PARTNERS LLP. So she must be in the right place. And the receptionist sat before a flat-screen monitor, so it must be the right time.

Ann stepped to the desk and said briskly, “Mr. Martin, please.”

The receptionist lifted her eyes from the screen, took Ann’s measure, and with blank, unhurried politeness, asked, “Do you have an appointment?”

“I’m with the Department of Investigation.” Ann showed her badge. “I need to speak with Mr. Martin.”

“You’re a police officer?”

“We’re an investigatory agency.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Martin doesn’t see anyone without an appointment. If you could give me some idea what this is about, maybe I could find someone else who can help you.”

“It’s about a homicide, it has to be Mr. Martin, and it won’t take long. Unless no one cooperates, in which case it could take days.”

“I’m sorry— ”

“No, but you will be.”

“I’m— ”

“You’re supposed to protect him from gate-crashers. I’ll tell him how hard you tried. But I guarantee you, everyone will be happier if he talks to me now than if I have to go all the way back downtown for a warrant.”

A brief pause; then, “Just a minute.” Pressing a button, the receptionist murmured into the headset of her phone. She busied herself with some papers: she didn’t look at Ann again.

Moments later, a young Asian woman emerged from a molding-encrusted, brass-handled door to beckon Ann through.

On the other side of the door— here featureless and smooth, with a brushed-steel knob— Ann found the spot and moment her transporter beam had been aimed at.

Rows of large-screen monitors marched to a window wall, interrupted here and there by tables awash in unfurled drawings. Well-groomed young people sat behind the monitors or stood over the drawings, while men and women half a generation older sat in cubicles down both sides of the room. Nowhere did Ann see a drafting table, but paper was everywhere, pinned or taped to every vertical surface: computer drawings, hand sketches, correspondence and calendars, notes and memos, instructions and lists. File cabinets and binder-stuffed bookcases supported desks and separated spaces. Everything was white and gray, sleek and minimal: industrial carpet, plastic laminate, glass and steel. The air buzzed with low talk and the ringing of phones, and Ann could practically smell the midnight oil.

Her guide led Ann down a hall and deposited her in a conference room. She hadn’t smiled once and she didn’t smile now, just nodded distractedly and hurried to her next task.

Ann walked to the window. The East River, Roosevelt Island, and Queens straight ahead, Brooklyn in a haze to the right, parts of the Bronx to the left: the view here was vast.

She wasn’t so much interested in the real world before her, though, as in the renderings and photos on the conference room walls. Brick, clapboard, cedar shingles; Dutch doors, mansard roofs, and, on one beach house, shutters clipped back to siding with wrought-iron scrollwork. The steel and glass of Modernism might never have happened, if you skipped the drafting room and went by the materials and elements in the work of Henry Martin.

And yet these buildings would never be mistaken for the products of a previous century. Like the columns at the receptionist’s desk, they were subtly wrong. The shutter clips were too heavy, or the window mullions too thin. The overhang of a low roof ran the length of one hilltop residence like a single glowering eyebrow. Oddly proportioned and strangely shaped, their details inappropriately applied and dissonantly numbered, these buildings spoke so loudly of the architect’s cleverness, education, and erudition that even Ann could hear it. They were showy, idiosyncratic, self-referential, and vain.

And three of them were Walter’s.

The Glybenhall name appeared under photographs of a hyper-genteel shopping mall with canopied wooden sidewalks; a seacoast spa built as steroid-pumped, porticoed cabins on a previously unspoiled stretch of shoreline; and a computer rendering of a Civil War theme park, proposed but as yet unbuilt due to vociferous local opposition. Ann remembered reading about that one. What would the rides be like, she’d wondered, and the dinner-theater shows?

“Are you the police officer who demanded to see me?” The man who spoke, closing the door behind him, was short, with heavy black-rimmed glasses, thick gray hair, and a withering glare. His nasal accent was New England prep school. He wore a white band-collared shirt. A worked-silver buckle set off his Armani jeans.

“Mr. Martin?”

“Of course. Who are you and what do you want?”

“Ann Montgomery, DOI.” She unclipped the badge from her lapel and held it out to him. He didn’t take it, just threw it a glance.

“DOI? Not the police? You threatened my receptionist. What kind of hysterical melodrama was that?”

“On the contrary, I complimented her on how well she did her job and promised to tell you about it. You should give her a raise.”

“I’m letting her go. If she did her job you’d never have gotten in. I don’t see people without appointments.”

“Mr. Martin, this isn’t a consultation, it’s a homicide investigation.”

“I don’t care what it is. My people have instructions: I do not talk to people who walk in off the street. I’m only seeing you now to tell you to leave.”

“As soon as you answer my questions, I’ll go and you can fire anyone you want.”

“You’re treating this as if it were funny. My staff’s obligation is to me.”

“No, I don’t think it’s funny. But my obligation is to the law.”

“And mine is to my clients and you’re wasting my time. What exactly do you want?”

“To talk about those clients. Who was your client for the Block A site in Harlem?”

“For the— What kind of a question is that?”

“The Times article didn’t list your name but the model and rendering were unmistakable.” As she said that she wondered if it was true. Would Joe, more attuned to the visual world than she, have known from a glance at the drawing who the architect was?

Maybe so, because Martin accepted the tribute without question. Appearing slightly mollified, he sniffed, “That was done for the city. The article described it as a city project. You can’t have missed that?”

“You’re forgetting I work for the city. ‘The city’ never does anything. It’s DDC, HPD, HRA, Real Property. And even then, it’s always the Division of This or the Bureau of That. Someone had to give you the number of apartments, the amount of commercial space, the parking. Someone had to approve your design concept.”

“No one ‘approves’ my design concepts. Clients come to me based on the way I approach design and then they stand back.”

“In this instance, who came to you?”

“The city.”

“Who paid your bill?”

He fixed his eyes on her. Unexpectedly, they were gray. With his coloring she’d have expected brown. Maybe they were contacts, to fit the office-and-clothing color scheme. “I did it pro bono.”

She laughed. “Pro bono? Wait, I know— you want to hear me do my warrant routine, the one your receptionist found so moving.”

“What’s the point of this, exactly?”

“The point, Mr. Martin, is that three people are now dead in connection with Block A. Withholding information regarding that property is a really bad idea.”

“Dead?” He hesitated. “What do you mean, dead?”

“Didn’t I say ‘homicide’? I know I meant to.”

“That project’s not built. It hasn’t even reached working drawings; it’s still in schematics. How can anyone be dead?”

“You’re finding that a hard concept to wrap yourself around? Then try this: explaining to the state licensing board why you obstructed my investigation.”

He paused, like a car at a crossroads, trying to choose a direction. “You’re from DOI,” he said, motoring on. “I don’t believe you have the authority to investigate homicide.”

“Technically, no. I could call Detective Perez from the NYPD if you’d like. He’s my liaison.” She took her cell phone from her pocket. “Of course, once the NYPD’s involved— ”

“Oh, don’t be stupid.” Martin waved an irritable hand. “I don’t know what the big deal is and I’m certainly not going to be left holding the bag. I was asked not to discuss it and I was attempting to honor that request. But you’re forcing me to break my word. I did that project for Walter Glybenhall.”

Ann felt her skin tingle. “Glybenhall hired you?”

“I believe that’s what that means.”

“His requirements? His design ideas?”

“Of course not. My design ideas. Walter’s a developer. He has a lot of money and a lot of ego, but a boringly pedestrian aesthetic sensibility.”

“You do a lot of work for him.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because you don’t like his aesthetic sensibility?”

“I don’t have to. He likes mine.”

“I see. But the approach to the Block A project was his idea?”

“Yes, though I modified it.”

“Why?”

“As usual, he wanted too much.”

That would be Walter. “What does that mean?”

“He was crowding the site. His program contained the same number of townhomes as the current design, and of course the entertainment-district atmosphere. But he wanted too many smaller rental units. They’d have to be shoehorned in. You need that in a place like Hidden Bay.” Martin nodded at the photo of the seaside resort. “But not in Harlem.”

“I’m not following.”

“I’m not surprised. And I really don’t have time to complete your education. But long story short, in an isolated setting the developer has to include housing for the waiters, gardeners, and maids. Something they can afford. Walter’s used to thinking like that.”

“Walter Glybenhall? To including things people can afford?”

“In those developments, it’s necessary. Otherwise you get a trailer park springing up down the road. That will lower the price point of your units.”

“Oh, the price point. For a second I thought I was hearing altruism.”

“Cue the violins! No developer’s ever been in business out of altruism. And no great project ever came from it, either. You think Andrew Carnegie built Carnegie Hall so New York could hear great music? He wanted to make certain that when New Yorkers went to a concert, they’d have to speak his name.”

It was a spectacular building, Skidmore’s Montgomery Hall, or so they said. Glass and concrete, austerely detailed, elegantly proportioned, quietly sited. Everything in the service of the music, the performers who made it, the audiences who came to hear. Ann had argued vehemently to her mother that her father, who did many good deeds without publicity, would not have wanted his name on the building. But her mother, focus of much publicity and author of few good deeds, decreed that was rubbish. She instructed the architect to use foot-high letters of bronze.

Ann swept her hair from her forehead. “Go back to Block A.”

Martin’s glittering eyes watched her through the heavy glasses. “In Harlem you don’t need to build that kind of housing. The service class can live right in the neighborhood. They already do.”

“ ‘The service class’? Do the people in Harlem know you call them that?”

“I doubt they know anything about me, I don’t consult the public for input. In fact I’ve seen Block A exactly three times. Since what we make of it will have nothing to do with what it is now, I, unlike Walter, don’t see any need to spend a lot of time there.”

“Glybenhall does?”

“He visits the site in what I’d call an unhealthily obsessive way. He stands outside the fence and stares, smiling. I went with him once and felt like a chaperone on a date. Extraneous, only distracting him from his contemplation of his beloved. And I didn’t care for the way people looked at us. I suggested, if he felt he had to keep going there, he stay in his car.”

“Did he take your suggestion?”

“I doubt it. He said not to worry, he could take care of himself.”

“Maybe he’s been studying the martial arts.”

Martin actually laughed. “And ruin his manicure? No, Walter’s solution is more straightforward. He carries a gun.”

Sutton Place

“Perez. Talk to me.” The voice came from the car’s speakers, hooked up to the cell phone.

“Luis, it’s Ann.” Steering the car through traffic, she spoke into the air.

“Oh, gee, Princess! What, you run out of punching bags?”

“And here I thought real cops were tough. Listen, Luis, one of our gangbanger victims, the one who was shot?”

“Ours? Those vics are Tom Underhill’s. Harriet Winston’s mine. And you don’t have any.”

“I’m starting to see why people say the NYPD’s a pain in the butt. What was he shot with?”

“A gun. Yeah, I know, ‘Put a cork in it, Luis.’ I don’t know if they have ballistics on that yet. I could ask Tom, but it’ll cost you.”

“Cost me what?”

“Dinner?”

“Won’t your wife get mad if you come home with your arm in a sling?”

He sighed. “Okay, how about you talk me up to your boss in about a year and a half?”

She glanced at the phone. “Really?”

“Just hedging my bets, Princess. Every level you hit, the next level gets harder. You see a lot of Boriquas wearing brass in this department?”