shirts they hated to wear.
“Bughouse,” said Chris under his breath. He managed a small incredulous smile.
“Stupid,” said Ben, shaking his head. “Stupid.”
“Anyway,” said Chris.
Chris and Ben shook hands.
“Same time tomorrow?” said Ben.
“I’ll pick you up.”
Ben left his tool belt in the back of the van and shut the doors. Chris watched his friend go into the stairwell of his building, then pulled from the lot and headed out of the city. By the time North Capitol became Blair Road, his bitterness had dissipated. He was thinking of a cool shower, a cold beer, and Katherine.
In his apartment, Ben Braswell washed up and changed his clothing. He phoned Renee to see if she wanted to hook up that night, and she said she did. She’d come by with a pizza and a Blockbuster movie when she got off work, around ten o’clock.
“See you then, girl,” said Ben.
“That’s a bet,” said Renee.
He took a catnap on his sofa. When he woke, the room had darkened. He got up, went to the window, and parted the blinds. There was still light left in the day.
Ben slipped a paperback into the back pocket of his jeans, left his place, went along the black iron fence to the open gate at Rock Creek Church and Webster, and entered the cemetery grounds. He was headed toward the Adams Memorial, where he would sit on the marble bench shielded by evergreens and read until dark.
He stepped down a road so narrow it was no kind of road, then went off it, taking a shortcut across a stand of graves. The dying sun settled on the headstones and threw shadows at his feet.
SIXTEEN
Mindy Kramer ate in the same place most every weekday. It was a Thai restaurant up in Wheaton, off University Boulevard, in an area heavy with Hispanics and Orthodox Jews, where nothing was upscale and fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts littered the streets.
The restaurant itself had little ambience, holding eight four-tops and a half-dozen deuces, with the standard royal family portraits hung on plain blue walls. But the food was clean, the service mostly efficient, and the specials went for four dollars and ninety-five cents, including a choice of spring rolls or watered-down lemongrass soup.
Thai Feast was out of the way from Mindy’s core business, which was down in Dupont, Capitol Hill, and that broad area of Shaw that included the neighborhood she and her fellow real estate professionals called Logan. Mindy made the half-hour trek out to Wheaton because Thai Feast had become her base camp. The girl who always served her, Toi, gave her the same deuce by the window, leaving it unoccupied until her arrival, and had her ice water and iced coffee on the table shortly after Mindy had taken her seat. As Mindy made her calls and answered e-mails from her BlackBerry, Toi was busy fetching the spring rolls that came with the special and making sure the main dish that Mindy had chosen would come out right behind it. The bill was always seven forty-nine, and Mindy always left one forty-nine in the tip column of the check, exactly 20 percent.
Mindy Kramer was all about routine and organization. She had married at twenty-two, had one daughter, Lisa, and divorced her layabout husband at twenty-five. She had raised and supported Lisa by herself as she got her license and grew her business. Now she had an office in Northwest, where “a girl” handled the phones and paperwork. Mindy had trained and polished two young sales proteges who, along with her, made up the Dream Team. Unfortunately, Lisa had made the same mistake as her mother and married a young man who had no energy or ambition outside the bedroom. She was now single with two little girls, ages six and four, of her own. Because she felt that Lisa was not emotionally equipped to be a proper mother to them, Mindy often took the children, Michelle and Lauren, with her to the office or dropped them off at summer day camp.
She handled all of this because she was efficient. And she looked good. At fifty-five, she was toned, well- dressed, and properly made up and manicured. There wasn’t one gelled, spiked, highlighted hair out of place on her head.
“How is your family, Toi?” said Mindy Kramer, as she added the tip and signed the credit card voucher before her.
“They are well,” said Toi with a smile.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Mindy.
“Thank you so much,” said Toi, her smile frozen in place.
Mindy Kramer got up and, smoothing her sleeveless lavender shift down her thighs, her purse in hand, left the restaurant, donning her oversize sunglasses as she walked toward her C-class, parked in the lot.
Watching Mindy through the plate glass window of Thai Feast, Toi let her smile fade. She couldn’t stand this weathered shrew with the stupid haircut, who would never round up the tip one penny to an even one fifty, who asked about her family but never really listened to the reply or looked into her eyes. But this was what you put up with every day. It was work.
Mindy got into her Mercedes and turned the ignition. She glanced at the Anne Klein watch on her tan, lightly freckled wrist. She was exactly on schedule to make her meeting down at the row house in Logan. She had gotten a call from a gentleman that morning, telling her he was interested in taking a look at the house. It had been a week since the break-in, and several months since she had bought the home at auction. The market was extremely soft, her interest rate had not been optimum, and the clock was ticking. But, like all good sales professionals, she was an optimist. Perhaps this would be the client she had been waiting for. It could very well be Mindy’s day.
There were two men standing at the top of her row house steps as Mindy Kramer pulled into a nearby space on the street. Her immediate impression, looking at them through the windshield of her sedan, was that these men could not be her potential buyers. They looked more like workmen than clients.
She got out of her car, smile in place, and walked across the sidewalk and up the steps to greet them. She kept her smile rigid as she got a good look at them, thinking, God, why are they wasting my time? She would qualify them quickly and let them know with diplomacy that this was too much house for them and that perhaps she could find them someplace else, in a neighborhood, say, where trailer trash was more welcome.
“Mindy Kramer,” she said, extending her hand to the larger of the two men.
“Ralph Cotter,” he said, vise-gripping her hand, showing her a row of grayish, cheaply capped teeth. “This is my friend Nat Harbin.”
“Pleasure,” said Nat Harbin. Tattoos of some kind showed on his veined biceps beneath the rolled-up edges of his T-shirt, and tattoos sleeved his forearms. He wore black ring-strap boots.
Cotter had not released her hand. She looked at his and saw a tattoo, like a four-leaf clover, on the crook of it. Cotter let go of her, stepped back, and smiled.
Both were in their late thirties and both wore jeans. Harbin in a black T-shirt and Cotter in a windbreaker with a white oxford underneath. Harbin had some sort of chain going from his wallet pocket to his belt loop. He was short and wiry, with a bushy mustache that appeared to originate in his nose. His eyes were flat and brown. His long brown hair was parted in the middle and it was unclean.
Cotter was tall, broad, and strong, with a big chest and an unchecked gut. His black hair was also on the long side and swept back behind his ears. He wore a dark walrus mustache on a face with high, pronounced cheekbones. His eyes were black, mostly pupil, and did not appear to be threatening or unkind.
Mindy prided herself on reading people. She was in a business that required such a talent, after all. These two were strange, stuck in a time warp, perhaps new to the city, and uninterested in current fashions. But they weren’t here to do her any harm. In any event, there had never been a situation that she couldn’t handle.
Mustaches, wallet chains, boots… costume macho. Gay bikers, thought Mindy Kramer. Okay, I’m projecting. Gay would fit fine here, though. But do they have the dosh to buy this house?
“You gentlemen are both interested in the property?” she said. “You’re considering it… together?”
“Yeah,” said Ralph Cotter. “Can we have a look inside?”
“Of course!”
Mindy opened her small purse, where she kept her BlackBerry and keys, and negotiated the lockbox hung on
