Then he got out, locked it, and walked back to the podium, and hung the fob on hook number fourteen of the key cabinet.
The key cabinet was new that fall. It was a steel box mounted to the wall behind the podium, with a touchscreen and a little lens at the top, and it had been installed by Capitol Premier Parking, the company that employed Teo and held the valet contract for the Marlowe and four other hotels downtown. Every fob had a tag with a chip in it. Every time a fob went onto a hook or came off one, the cabinet logged it, along with the valet's employee code and a still photograph from the lens. Management had installed it after a Porsche disappeared from a hotel in Norfolk. The valets called it the Snitch.
"It takes a picture of your face every time you touch a key," Marisol had complained the first week. "What if I'm having a bad hair day?"
"Then the company will know you're having a bad hair day," Teo had said.
* * *
At the corner of Franklin and Adams, under the cast-iron streetlamp, stood Officer Russell Dacey of the Richmond Police Department.
He was not, technically, on duty. He was working what the department called secondary employment, an off-duty detail, paid at sixty-two dollars an hour by the Marlowe Hotel through a security contractor called Bulwark Event Services. He wore his full uniform, his badge, his duty belt, his radio, and his gun, because that was the point of hiring a police officer instead of a man in a blazer. What he did not wear was a functioning body camera. The department's policy said that officers on secondary employment "should" carry and activate their body-worn cameras during enforcement actions. The camera on Dacey's chest was clipped there, and its little green light was dark, and nobody had checked whether its battery had been charged since Thursday.
Teo had worked a dozen events where Dacey held the corner. The officer was in his late forties, thick through the shoulders, with a sunburned neck and a way of standing with his thumbs hooked into his belt that made the belt seem like the most important thing about him. He did not talk much to the valets. Once, the previous spring, he had watched Teo run to fetch a car and called out, not loudly, "Careful, they'll think you're running from something," and laughed to himself. Teo had kept running. That was another rule, one Ruth Halvorsen had not needed to give him: when a man with a gun makes a joke, you do not hear it.
At a quarter to eight a tall white man with silver hair and a cashmere scarf thrown over his tuxedo stepped out of a black Escalade at the curb, handed his key to Marisol without looking at her, and walked over to the corner to shake Dacey's hand.
Teo knew who he was. Everybody downtown knew who Hollis Brandt was. His name was on the construction fencing around half the cranes in Scott's Addition, and on a plaque in the lobby of a children's hospital wing, and on a lawsuit, currently pending, against the city's Commission of Architectural Review. The previous spring Brandt Development had proposed a residential tower, twenty-eight stories of blue-green glass, to be cantilevered over the Marlowe's back half, the hotel's 1895 ballroom wing gutted to make a lobby for it. The Commission had held three hearings. At the third, a soft-spoken architect who had restored the Marlowe a decade earlier had stood at the lectern with a set of structural drawings and explained, in eleven calm minutes, exactly why the hotel's original load-bearing masonry walls could not take the eccentric loads the cantilever would put on them, and exactly how many of the building's historic features would have to be destroyed to reinforce them. The Commission voted seven to two against the tower. A columnist at the Times-Dispatch called the testimony "the most devastating eleven minutes in Richmond land-use history."
The architect was Julian Ashby. Brandt's appeal of the decision was scheduled to be heard by City Council in five weeks.