and walked to the house. Samuels’s office was on the second floor, up a curving line of block steps.
We had expected the geriatric receptionist, but it was Samuels himself who answered the door. He looked to be reasonably fit, a thin, silver-haired man at the very end of his middle years, with prosperity-or the illusion of it- apparent in every thread of his clothes. He wore a nonvented Italian-cut suit over a powder blue shirt with a white spread collar, and a maroon tie featuring subtle geometrics, gray parallelograms shaded in blue to pick up the blue off the suit. His face was long, sharply featured, and angular, except for his lips, which were thick and damp and oddly red, reminding me somehow of a thinly sliced strawberry.
“Mr. Stefanos?” he said in that fine brandy baritone.
“Yes. My partner, Jack LaDuke.” The two of them shook hands.
“Please, come in.”
We followed him through the reception area, low-lit and deeply carpeted, with stained wood trim framing Williamsburg blue walls. Next was his office, the same cozy deal, but with a bigger desk, walls painted a leafy green, and a window view that gave onto the street. LaDuke and I sat in two armchairs he had arranged in front of his desk. Samuels had a seat in his cushioned broad-backed chair and wrapped his hand around a thick Mont Blanc pen.
“You’re all alone,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “My receptionist is taking lunch. For one hour each day, I field my own calls.”
“It’s just the two of you here?”
“It hasn’t always been this way. I had a staff of six at one time, including my own in-house real estate attorney. But that was the eighties. And the eighties are over, Mr. Stefanos. The banks went through some tremendous changes near the end of the decade, as you know. When the flow of money stopped, everything stopped-all the growth. But this is a cyclical business that, by definition, adjusts itself. There are signs that the residential is coming back, and the commercial will naturally follow.”
“Of course,” I said, though I didn’t have a clue. LaDuke had tented his hands, his elbows on the arms of his chair, and he was tapping both sets of fingers together at the tips.
“So how can I help you?” Samuels said.
“I’m working on a murder investigation,” I said. “As I mentioned to you on the phone, I’ve been privately retained. Through a series of interviews-I won’t bore you with the details-I’ve come to believe that there might be some criminal activity going on in your warehouse property at Potomac and Half.”
“You mentioned that it might be related to Vice.”
“For starters. I suspect pornography involving male minors. That kind of business is usually tied to something else.”
Samuels frowned. “Let me say first that I’m not cognizant of any such activity in any of my properties. If what you’re claiming is a reality, however, it disturbs me. It disturbs me a great deal. You can never anticipate this kind of thing, not totally. All my potential tenants are interviewed, but as long as the rent checks arrive in a reasonably timely manner and there are no major physical problems with the property, you lose touch. Often a tenant will sublet without my knowledge and-”
“We’d like to get in,” LaDuke said sharply.
Samuels kept his dignity and his eyes on me. “I pulled the file after you called, Mr. Stefanos.” He fingered the edges of some papers on his desk. “The tenants on the lease are using the area both as a silk-screen production house for T-shirts and as a storage facility.”
“Would it be possible to get in there and talk to them?”
“Mr. Stefanos, in my business, in any business, in fact, control is very important. If I could both own these properties and run my own profit centers out of them-in other words, if I could control every aspect in the chain, all the way down the line-believe me, I’d do it. But unfortunately, I can’t. So essentially I’m in a partnership arrangement with my tenants, for better or worse. And I have to honor that partnership. So you can see why I just can’t let you in there, willy-nilly, on the basis of some unsubstantiated accusation.”
“But you also wouldn’t want the inconvenience, and publicity, of an official police intervention.”
Samuels said, “And neither would you. You say you’re privately retained-if the cops, in effect, solve whatever it is you’re working on, wouldn’t that essentially make you unemployed?”
“We’re talking about boys,” LaDuke said with obvious impatience. “They’re being forced against their will-”
“Hold on a second,” Samuels said, his voice rising. He turned a framed photograph around on his desk so that it faced LaDuke. In the frame was a family picture-the businessman’s favorite prop-of Samuels, his wife, and two children, a teenaged boy and girl. Samuels regained his composure. “You see this? I’m a father, young man. Now, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. I’m only saying that we have to do te h bohis properly. Do you understand?”
LaDuke didn’t answer. I said, “What did you have in mind?”
“I’m going to speak to my attorney this afternoon. We’ll see how we can work this out. I’m thinking maybe by tomorrow, we’ll be able to get you in there, or at least get you some kind of answers. How can I reach you, Mr. Stefanos?”
“I’ll call you, first thing in the morning. And thanks. I appreciate the cooperation.”
We all stood then, as there was nothing else to say. Samuels showed us to the door. Out on 22nd, we walked to the Dodge.
“How’d I do?” LaDuke said.
“You gotta learn when to use the muscle and when not to. Samuels, he’s not going to respond to that. He doesn’t have to. He’s a developer-he probably has a relationship with every member of the city council. He could erase us, man, if we push it too hard.”
“You sayin’ I almost blew it?”
“You could use a little seasoning, that’s all.”
“You think he’s gonna help us?”
“He’ll help us,” I said. “He’s a smart man. The way I put it to him, he’s got no other choice.”
I drove to my apartment and cut the engine. LaDuke said that he had something to do, and I let him go. I watched his brooding face as he walked to his Ford, then I watched him drive away. Then I went inside and sorted through my mail, my cat figure-eighting my feet. The red light was blinking on my answering machine. I hit the bar.
A voice that I recognized came through the speaker: “Stefanos, this is Barry. I met you at Calvin Jeter’s apartment, at his mom’s? I’m the father to his sister’s baby… Anyway, I was headin’ over to Theodore Roosevelt Island this afternoon. Up behind the statue, there’s a trail, to the left? Down there to the end, where it comes to a T. You go straight in, on a smaller trail, down to the water, facing Georgetown. That’s where I’ll be. I just thought, man… I just thought you might want to talk. Like I say… I don’t know. That’s where I’ll be.”
I walked quickly from the apartment, the sound of the machine rewinding at my back.
SEVENTEEN
Theodore Roosevelt Island is a nature preserve, eighty-eight acres of swamp, forest, and marsh in the middle of the Potomac River, between Virginia and D.C. I took the GW Parkway to the main lot and parked beside Barry’s Z. A couple of immigrant fisherman sat with their rods on the banks of the Little River, and a Rollerblader traversed the lot, but typical of a midweek day in midsummer, the park looked empty.
I took the footbridge over theI. I river, then hit a trail up a grade and into the woods, to the monument terrace. I crossed the square, walking around the seventeen-foot-high bronze statue of a waving Teddy Roosevelt that sat on a high granite base, and walked over another footbridge spanning a dry moat. Then I cut left onto a wide dirt path that wound through a forest of elm, tulip, and oak and took the path down to where it met the swamp trail that perimetered the island. I stayed straight on in, toward the water. Barry was there, wearing a white T-shirt and shorts, sitting on a fallen tree, beneath a maple that had rooted at the eroded bank.
“Hey, Barry.”
“Hey, man.”
I sat on the log, my back against the trunk of the maple. Barry watched me as I shook a cigarette out of my
