In This Rain (16 page)

“Thanks, Mayor. But we didn’t come here for advice.”

Charlie Barr sighed. “No, I guess you didn’t. You came for a promise you’re not going to get. Except that I promise to read this. But that’s it.”

“Well,” Ford grinned, “that’s better than a poke in the eye.”

“You’ll never find that here, Ford. I hope you know that. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No, we’ve taken up enough of your time.” Ford stood. “Thank you for seeing us. If you have any questions you know where to find me. And I’m sure once you’ve studied our proposal you’ll see the viability of it. And the moral righteousness, too.”

The mayor eyed him for a moment, then also stood, and also grinned. “I’m sure,” Charlie Barr said, “that you’re sure. I just hope you have a fallback.”

“Faith. That’s always been my fallback.”

“Well, I’ve heard it moves mountains. Thank you for coming.”

They all shook hands again. The mayor saw them to the door and the deputy mayor escorted them down just as he’d brought them up. On their way back to the lobby, at Ford’s suggestion, they took the grand, curving stair.

Sutton Place

On her way to the office Ann speed-dialed Jen’s number and left a where-the-hell-were-you-last-night message. Not that she was angry— if you were a friend of Jen’s this was just how it went— but, it being Jen, there was probably a funny story behind her no-show, and if so, Ann wanted to hear it. She was in the mood for a funny story.

In the open DOI bullpen, the morning sun cut glaring squares on the vinyl floor. Ann slung her bag over her chair, sat, and slid open her file drawer. The Pendaflex she lifted out was labeled “Three Star” and it was so far pretty thin but it wasn’t going to stay that way.

Ann worked alone. Since Joe’s arrest she hadn’t had a partner. At first she didn’t see the point of getting used to someone new; Joe would be back as soon as the stupidity of this whole thing became as obvious to everyone as it was to her. Later, after his conviction and her exile to Siberia, she’d refused every partner Greg Lowry tried to assign her. She didn’t have the seniority to take that stand but Greg must have sensed what would happen if he didn’t back off. And no one was clamoring to work with Joe Cole’s partner anyway.

*

Three years ago, on an overcast morning after days of rain, Joe had stopped by her desk. From the sparkle in his eye she could see he was about to go out in the field. Before he spoke she’d shrugged, pointed to the six-inch pile of affidavits, reports, and notes in front of her, and said, “I can’t.”

“Damn,” Joe had said. “Well, no big deal.”

“What’s up?”

“That Buildings Department inspector. Manelli.”

“You’ve been chasing him for months.”

“I think I found a guy who can lock him up for me.”

“Who?”

“Site super named O’Doul, Dolan Construction. I’m going to go sniff around.”

“I hate to make you do it alone.”

“No problem,” Joe had said. “I know these guys.”

*

Ann fingered the Three Star file. From nowhere it occurred to her how beautiful the morning light would look glowing off a bowl of flowers on her desk. Peonies, maybe, like the ones just opening in Joe’s new garden.

She peeled back the lid of the latte she’d brought up from the lobby— no reason in the world she’d ever seen to drink DOI coffee— and sipped while she punched in a phone number.

A ring and a half, then “Bronx Homicide. Sergeant Perez.”

“Hi, Luis, it’s Ann.”

“Hey, my favorite bureaucrat. How are you? Recovered from girls’ night out?”

“Completely. You? Recovered from your weekend?”

“Hey, I’m a real cop. Peewee soccer, sixth-grade graduation, mother-in-law’s birthday— bring it on, I can handle it.”

“NYPD’s lucky to have tough guys like you, Luis. You have that list for me?”

“Looking at it. Go stand by your fax machine in a minute or two.”

“I’m standing there now.”

“It’ll still be a minute or two. I gotta walk all the way to the other end of the room to fax it, so I’d have to hang up on you, which I don’t want to do, you being the bright spot in my morning and all.”

“If that’s your best stuff, it needs work.”

“Yeah, that’s what my wife says.” Perez sighed. “But listen, this list: we checked them out, and there’s nothing juicy.”

“How many on it?”

“Eight.”

“And none of them looked good to you?”

“Couple of people not so happy, but didn’t look like anyone had a grudge against Three Star that would be big enough for something like this.”

“You never know what sets people off.”

“Ain’t that the truth. But to keep going back again and again

And you gotta know what you’re doing, pull off this kind of accidents, make them look like accidents. Couldn’t find anyone who fit. So the thinking here is, probably they were accidents.” He paused. “Unless you can prove what you were saying last night.”

“You better believe I’ll try. But even if my engineer’s wrong, there could be contributory negligence on Three Star’s part.”

“Could be, but not from the people on this list. They don’t work there no more, that’s why they’re on it.”

“Well, my investigation’s a little different from yours. I’d still like a look.”

“Whatever. Like usual, us real cops are happy to cooperate with DOI. You find something, though, I’ll be the first to know?”

“Absolutely. DOI’s always happy to cooperate with real cops.”

“Great. Hey, when are you and me going to go out?”

“When pigs fly?”

“Yeah.” Luis sighed again. “That’s what my wife says.”

The fax came through a few minutes later. Eight names, employees who’d been terminated by Three Star in the weeks before the scaffold gave way. Terminated employees were always a good bet for troublemaking, and she and Joe had gotten far focusing on them. Though Joe had laughed at “terminated,” preferring “fired.” If someone had gone ahead and terminated them, they wouldn’t be here making trouble, he said.

In the corner by the window, at the desk that used to be Joe’s, Eve Rudin leaned over two sheets of paper, comparing them. She’d had the most seniority when Joe went to prison, so she’d gotten that desk. Ann liked Eve well enough, but she’d found herself moving her file cabinet and reorganizing her things so that her chair faced the other way.

Ann carried the fax back to her desk. The room was filling up. Beefy ex-cops loosened their ties, reached across steel desks for their phones. Two young guys, recent John Jay grads, came out of the kitchenette arguing about the Knicks. They were all good investigators, but she couldn’t come up with a single one who’d give her more than a blank stare if she asked whether they thought the word “terminated” was funny.

She sipped her cooling latte while she studied the list. Perez was meticulous and thorough. Though his handwriting, which she’d never seen before, was interestingly illegible. Below each typed name was the last date of employment, current address, and official reason for termination, all also typed. In the margins, Perez had scrawled the name of the current employer, as well as whatever off-the-record comments he’d been able to worm out of Three Star’s personnel department. He hadn’t found what he was looking for. But Ann was looking for something different.

She checked the reasons for termination. For the six office personnel, it was department restructuring or downsizing. For the two construction workers, one had obviously had some appeal for Perez— drinking on the job— but that guy had been in jail in Riverhead for disorderly conduct (Perez’s scribble read “pissing in public”) when the scaffold collapsed, and when the fire started. The other had been let go for clocking in late way too often. The week after his layoff he’d moved to Las Vegas.

She scanned Perez’s scratchy comments on the six desk jockeys, looking for people with bad attitudes. She found two. One was a man from Accounting with what the HR director called a “negative personality.” Now, what was that? Like matter-antimatter, contact between him and normal people made the office explode? Or was he some kind of black hole, a gravity well of personableness, into which anything pleasant and easygoing was sucked and crushed?

Ann was tempted to call the HR director just to find out. But it was a random tangent, the kind of thought that, when she spoke it out loud, used to make Joe stare and then burst out laughing.

The other employee the HR director had allowed, off the record, was “difficult” seemed more promising. Margaret Mary Tiemeyer was in the construction management department. Not just a desk jockey, Tiemeyer was responsible for certain kinds of paperwork and also jobsite supervision. Putative reason for being let go: “department reorganization.” But in reorganizations some people stay and some are shown the door, and there’s always a reason. In Tiemeyer’s case, her supervisor had found her “insubordinate” and “inappropriately confrontational.”

Now, that was just what Ann needed: a woman who didn’t know her place.

She was lifting her bag out of her desk drawer when her phone buzzed. She stuck it between ear and shoulder. “Montgomery,” she said, shrugging into her coat.

“You have a few minutes?” Ann looked over to Greg Lowry’s office in the corner of the room. He was leaning out from behind his desk, angled so he could see through the door. She nodded rather than answering, took off her coat, and hung it over her chair. When she got to his office, Lowry was on the phone again. “How’s right now?” he said, and hung up. “Sit down,” he told Ann. She waited for the sound of footfalls crossing the room. Quick, light. And leather soled: a John Jay guy, then, not an ex-cop. Dennis Graham, whippet thin and, as usual, in a gray suit more or less the color of a whippet’s coat, trotted through the doorway. Dennis was young, ambitious, and smart, and if he sometimes reminded Ann of the student manager of her college track team in his eagerness, that probably wasn’t his fault.

“I wanted to do a little information sharing here,” Lowry began. “Make sure Ann’s up to speed on everything you had, Dennis. How’s Brooklyn, by the way? Going okay so far?”

“So far, great,” Dennis said. “Was out there over the weekend just to scope it, going to go on out and set myself up there this morning. Looks like it’s going to be fun.”

“Great,” said Lowry. “So, Ann, this is your chance. Any questions for Dennis? About Three Star, the site, anything?”

“Not really,” said Ann. “I spent the weekend going through Dennis’s files. They seem very thorough. Just one thing: How seriously did you take the sabotage idea?”

“Not very,” Dennis Graham said. “I expected Three Star to claim it— gets them off the hook. But I couldn’t find any evidence. Or any reason— union problems, insurance, pay disputes, no reason I could see for anyone to do that.”

“Why sabotage?” Lowry asked Ann. “You have something?”

“I might. About the scaffolding. But if Dennis didn’t find anything

”

Dennis shook his head again.

“Were you looking beyond Three Star?” Lowry asked Dennis. “A guy like Glybenhall’s bound to have enemies.”

“I started down that road. I didn’t find anything that looked promising. The only thing I was thinking, if it were true, maybe it would have something to do with the other site.”

“What other site?” Lowry asked.

“There’s a persistent rumor the only reason Glybenhall’s doing this project at all is because he’s been promised another site if he succeeds,” Dennis said. “I was thinking, maybe someone doesn’t want him to have that site.”

“Where did you hear that?” Ann asked. “It’s not in your files.”

“Seems to be floating around. Didn’t write it down because I couldn’t verify it. I don’t know if it’s true. Or where that site is. Or even what ‘succeed’ on this one would mean.”

Lowry snorted. “At this point, ‘finish the job without anyone else getting killed.’ ”

Ann and Dennis exchanged a glance. “Mayor’s meeting yesterday didn’t go well?” Ann asked Lowry.

“Oh, it went fine. Sort of. Mark and I told the mayor we didn’t see Virginia McFee or Les Farrell as bent.”

“Is that bad?”

“No, it’s good, except we didn’t offer him anyone else.”

“Seems like what he’d be hoping is that no one’s bent.”

“What Charlie Barr’s hoping is that someone can make this whole thing go away before he starts to fundraise for his next race. Look, Ann, if you think there’s something in this sabotage thing, get someone to look at it. A forensic engineer.”

“I already— I was planning to. I’m sending it to Sandy Weiss, at Packer.”

“Good.”

In the old, pre–Dolan Construction days, DOI used in-house engineers for forensic work. When you had people like Joe Cole on staff, you didn’t need outside experts. The shift to outsourcing had been Lowry’s first major procedural edict as the post-Dolan IG.

“And see if you can find that other site and who’s involved,” Lowry went on. “It would be nice.” He sounded almost wistful.

“If the sabotage were real?”

“It would make Hizzoner very happy if Glybenhall turns out to be a victim, not a snake.”

“He may turn out to be a victim,” Ann said. “He’s still a snake.”

Harlem: Frederick Douglass Boulevard

Ford and Ray rode the subway back uptown. Don Zalensky had offered them the use of the mayor’s limo. “He’s here all day,” Zalensky said, lighting a cigarette. “He won’t need it.”

“Thank the mayor for us,” Ford answered. “But we’ll take the train.”

Zalensky nodded, shook their hands again, and watched them down the wide stone steps.

“You ever know him to say a word in a meeting?” Ford asked Ray.

“Not everyone loves a soapbox,” Ray answered. “Or a pulpit.”

The subway was too crowded for conversation and too hot for words. They lurched, swayed, and sweated for twenty minutes until finally they escaped up the stairs into what was, by contrast, a cool breeze. Standing in the sunlight, Ray retrieved a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Maybe we should have taken the mayor’s ride.”

“ ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ ” Ford said.

“That’s Shakespeare, not scripture.”