Black guy in a tux just took a key off the valet board himself. Walking to the side lot. Green Maybach. Not his car. Check him.
At 10:40:15: Hurry.
At 10:40:19, from Dacey: On it.
And then, at 11:34 p.m., while Julian Ashby lay cuffed to a gurney four floors below his daughter, Dacey had written: Your plaster man's at the ER in cuffs. Owes me one.
At 11:36 p.m., HB Boss had replied: Ribeye at Lemaire on me. And see you January 4. Welcome aboard.
The state police found the rest in Dacey's email. On September eighth, Brandt Development's chief operating officer had sent Russell Dacey a formal offer letter for the position of Director of Site Security, reporting directly to Hollis Brandt, at a salary of one hundred forty-eight thousand dollars a year, more than twice what he earned from the City of Richmond, with a start date of January fourth, contingent on "continued good standing with the Richmond Police Department and a positive reference from your current command." Dacey had signed it on the ninth.
When Colette Hargrove read the thread, she called Delphine and read it to her over the phone, and then she said, "He knew. Brandt knew exactly whose car it was. He knew exactly who that man was. He used a police officer like a stick to hit somebody he was angry at. And the officer let himself be used, for a steak and a job, and because the man on the other end of the stick was Black and in a tuxedo next to a car nobody in that officer's head thought a Black man ought to own." She was quiet for a moment. "I've been doing this for twenty-four years, Delphine. I have never in my life wanted so badly to stand up in front of a jury."
* * *
She did not get to. Most people don't, in the end. But the things that happened instead happened fast, and in public, and one on top of another, the way a wall comes down when you've pulled the right stone.
On October thirtieth, Russell Dacey was terminated by the Richmond Police Department. On November second, a special grand jury returned an indictment charging him with assault and battery, with two counts of knowingly making a materially false statement in an official police report, and with conspiracy to make a false report to law enforcement. The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services, under the decertification law the General Assembly had passed four years earlier, opened proceedings to strip his certification as a law enforcement officer anywhere in the Commonwealth. He would plead guilty the following March to the assault and to one count of false reporting, and be sentenced to eleven months, with all but sixty days suspended, and he would never wear a badge again. Brandt Development rescinded his job offer by email, the morning after the indictment, in two sentences.
Hollis Brandt was charged on November second with knowingly giving a false report to a law enforcement officer and with conspiracy. He did not go to jail, in the end; he pleaded no contest to the false-report charge in February and paid a fine that was smaller than what he spent on the lawyers. But the bank that was financing his Scott's Addition towers, a regional lender whose president had sat at his high-top table on the night of the gala, announced on November fifth that it was "pausing" its relationship with Brandt Development pending "a review of reputational risk." Two other lenders followed within the month. The children's hospital quietly took the plaque out of its lobby. And on November sixth, three days before Richmond City Council was to hear it, Brandt's lawyers filed a one-page notice withdrawing his appeal of the Commission of Architectural Review's decision on the Marlowe tower. It cited "changed business circumstances." The Marlowe's ballroom wing would stand.