Manny was right. It made no sense. People ran into all kinds of troubles in their lives—rich people as well as poor and those struggling in the middle—and Ted thought that he had heard all of their stories. But this case was unlike any other. Miss Miller was old, granted, and therefore liable to have been hospitalized, developed dementia, or died. But the management company should have taken care of paying the bills and collecting rents. That was both what they were paid for and how they got paid. They would have to be his next call. He’d need to give it some thought first. They weren’t going to easily open up for him.

As soon as he heard from Lester.

Ted finished the second slice and flipped through an abandoned copy of El Diario while he waited. Spanish had been the dominant language of the streets when Ted was growing up, but he’d never conquered the accent. He understood a little of what he heard, if the idioms were familiar, but he had trouble framing sentences more complex than those needed for ordering a meal. But he could read it well enough—given both time and a picture above a story to lend some context. The news didn’t read any better in Spanish.

libre, pero sin hogar

Six men, arrested and then released by Immigration, had returned home to find their apartments emptied, their belongings gone, and the buildings boarded up and awaiting demolition. The feds—ICE and Homeland Security—had raided two buildings in Queens a month before, netting two men ostensibly wanted in Peru for terrorist activities and four alleged undocumented aliens. That was background. The current story was that all six people had been released as evidence mounted that they were all legal immigrants—the Peruvians had been in the States for decades and both were citizens. But while they had been in custody, their apartments had been emptied and the buildings sold to a development company. Ted wasn’t surprised to see that it was LBC—Reisner. When contacted, the recent landlord of the buildings had claimed to have no responsibility, though he’d offered the men $1,000 as a “hardship donation.” Buried in the last paragraph was a quote from an ICE spokesman, apologizing for the unfortunate situation and claiming that they could not reveal the sources that had led to the raid.

The story danced admirably on the knife-edge of hinting that LBC had orchestrated the deal, duping both the feds and the citizens. The implication was probably not actionable, or the editors would never have let it through, but the point was clear to anyone with a skeptical frame of mind. Most New Yorkers fit that description.