Teo watched the two men at the corner. Brandt was talking and Dacey was nodding. Brandt laughed and put a hand on the officer's shoulder in the easy, ownerly way of someone who has been paying for things his whole life. Then he went inside.
"You know they're friends," Marisol said, following Teo's gaze. "That cop and the developer guy. Bulwark does security for all Brandt's construction sites. Dacey works those too. My cousin's boyfriend does drywall for Brandt. He says Dacey's at the Scott's Addition site every weekend, sitting in his car eating sunflower seeds and getting paid."
"Good job, if you can get it," Teo said.
"You want it?"
"I want to never talk to a police officer for the rest of my life."
She looked at him, then looked away. Marisol was born in Petersburg. She had a car loan and a son in second grade and no rules from any lawyer. But she knew about Teo's case, because he had asked her once, early, to cover a shift so he could go to a biometrics appointment, and she had never once mentioned it since, which was a kind of love.
"Then keep your head down," she said, "and park the Bentleys."
* * *
Inside, the Marlowe's ballroom was doing what Julian had hoped it would do when he spent three years of his life restoring it: it was making people look up.
The ceiling was a coffered barrel vault, the plaster coffers picked out in pale gold, and in each coffer a rosette. When Julian's firm had first climbed the scaffolding in 2013, a third of those rosettes had been missing, and another third were held up by nothing but paint and habit. He had found the original plaster molds in a crate in the hotel's sub-basement, cataloged by a long-dead foreman in pencil on a pine lid: Ballroom rosettes, 64, S. Weller & Sons, 1895. He had had them recast by a plasterer in Lynchburg who was the last man in Virginia who still did it by hand. Tonight the room was full of four hundred people in black and silver, and nearly every one of them, at some point in the evening, tipped their head back and looked up, and Julian, standing near the back with a club soda, watched them do it and felt something in his chest unclench.
"You're doing it again," said a voice beside him.