George Pelecanos - Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

“Lot of activity around here.”

“Not at night. Used to be a couple of nightclubs, ten, fifteen years back, that jumped pretty good. But nothing now.” I pushed the trans into drive.

“Where now?” LaDuke said.

“Office of Deeds,” I said. “We find out who collects the rent.”

The office of the Recorder of Deeds sat around 5th and D, near Judiciary Square, the area of town that contained the city’s courts and administrative facilities. The building has a funny old elevator that doesn’t quite make it to the top floors; to get to where the records are kept, you have to get off the lift and take the stairs the rest of the way. LaDuke and I did it.

There was one disinterested woman working a long line, but I was lucky to see a bar customer of mine, a real estate attorney by the name of Durkin, sitting in a wooden chair, waiting for his number to be called. He also had a copy of the Lusk’s Directory, a crisscross land reference guide, in his lap. I borrowed it from him and promised him a free warm Guinness Stout-his drink-the next time he was by the Spot. Durkin tipped the fedora that he wore even indoors and gave me the book. By the time my microfiche had been retrieved from the files, I knew enough with the help of the Lusk’s to have the name of the landlord who owned the warehouse at Potomac and Half. The name was Richard Samuels.

From there, it wasn’t a stretch to get an address and phone. If Samuels was like every minimogul/land baron I’ve met, he could not have resisted putting his name on his own company. He would have told you the ID made good business sense, but it was as much ego as anything else. And his name was on the company-Samuels Properties was listed in the first phone book we hunted down, right outside the District Building; the address matched that printed on the deed. LaDuke flipped me a quarter and I rang him up.

“Samuels Properties,” said the old lady’s voice on the other end.

“Metropolitan Police,” I said, “calling for Richard Samuels.” LaDuke shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Let me see if he’s on the line.” She put me on hold, came back quickly. “If this is about the fund-raising drive, Mr. Samuels has already sent the check-”

“Tell him it’s about his property at Potomac and Half.”

“Hold on.” More waiting, then: “I’ll put you through.”

Another voice, deep and rich, came on the line. “Yes, how may I help you?”

“My name is Nick Stefanos-”

“Officer Stefanos?”

“No.”

“You’re not a cop?”

“Private.”

“Well, then, you’ve misrepresented yourself. I guess we have nothing to talk about.”

“I think we do. You might be interested in some activity going on in your property on Half Street in Southeast. And if you’re not interested, maybe Vice-”

“Vice?” His tone lost its edge. “Listen, Mr. Stefanos, I’m certainly not aware of any illegal activities, not on Half Street or on any of my properties. But I am interested, and I’m willing to listen to what you’ve got to say.”

“My partner and I would like to see you this morning. The conversation would be confidential, of course.”

“That would be fine,” Samuels said. He confirmed the address.

“We’ll be right over,” I said, and hung up the phone.

LaDuke scrunched up his face. “You identified yourself as a cop, Nick. This guy Emmanual-”

“It’s Samuels.”

“He could turn us in.”

“Come on, LaDuke. We’re standing at the door. Let’s go see what the man’s got to say.”

The office of Samuels Properties was on a street of commercially zoned row houses just north of Washington Circle, in the West End. We parked the Dodge in a lot owned by Blackie Auger, one of D.C.’s most visible Greeks, 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.”