In This Rain (4 page)

Now it was early June. Leaves, stalks, buds, and blooms luxuriated, stretching up and out. Colors glowed and perfume swirled on a sun-warmed breeze. Sharp or soft, fragile or plump, everything was exuberant, boisterous with release.

*

And here was Ann, sitting beside him, telling him she needed him.

Harlem: State Office Building

“What happened here?” Edgar Westermann’s chest rose and fell with his attempt to recover his breath, but his voice was loud and fierce. He scanned the scene. Tom Underhill seemed to be in charge. A good man, Underhill, even if he did buy into a system that remained way overbalanced in favor of white justice. Still, it had taken a lot of years and some real knuckle-busters to get black detectives promoted in numbers and stationed in the community, and having men like Underhill around was better than the alternative.

Edgar pushed through the usual New York disaster crowd, dressed incongruously well for rubbernecking because it was Sunday in Harlem. He’d almost reached the front when he heard a familiar voice: “Edgar, not now.”

Ford Corrington. Should have known. Teeth instantly on edge, Edgar looked around for Corrington, and barked. “They tell me T. D. Tilden was killed! What the hell you mean, ‘not now’?” He turned his back on Corrington. “Tom Underhill!”

“Yes, Mr. Westermann?” The detective faced Edgar across the yellow tape.

“What happened to this boy?”

“We don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t know? Another black child lies dead on a city street and all the police can tell me is, you don’t know?”

“He fell to his death. From the roof, probably. That’s as much as we know.”

“Was he alone? Was there foul play? Does the roof have railings? What are conditions up there, did anyone think to check? Who’s the landlord— this another city-owned slum?”

“We’ll answer all those questions in good time, Mr. Westermann.”

“In good time? Is that what you said to the family of the young woman whose body was found in the East River this morning? Or did you say ‘Yessir, yessir, we’re on it’ because she was white?”

“With respect, sir, you’re not this young man’s family. And I’d ask how you know about that young woman— ”

“And I’d tell you I keep track of what happens in Harlem!”

“— and I know that and that’s why I’m not asking. That victim’s still unidentified and yessir, we’re working on it and yessir, we’re working on this, too. Though occasionally we have to stop to respond to the questions of curious civilians.”

“Curious civilians?”

“Yessir, and thank you for your concern. Now, if I could— ”

Dismiss Edgar Westermann? I don’t think so. “This boy’s people— have they been notified? Have they been considered at all?”

“His mama’s upstairs.” From behind Edgar, Ford Corrington’s voice came quietly. “I’d be obliged if you’d leave her be.”

“You’d be— ” Edgar stopped. Deliberately, he spoke again to Underhill. “Detective, Harlem is watching you. Harlem wants results!” He gave Underhill a glare, then faced Corrington. “Ford. I know you’re showing good Christian concern, and I’m sure the boy’s family appreciates it. Now I believe I’ll go on up and offer my condolences, and any help the Borough President’s Office can provide.”

Corrington moved left a step or two, putting himself between Edgar and the building’s stoop. “Not now,” he repeated. “Sarah will be receiving later, I’m sure. Condition she’s in now, she wouldn’t be able to appreciate your visit anyhow.”

Edgar eyed Corrington, not fooled but no fool, either. If he and Corrington got into a shoving match here, they’d both come out looking like natural-born halfwits. Which, he knew from experience, wouldn’t bother Corrington at all.

It had been sixteen years since Ford Corrington had burst on the scene, the Harvard man ready to set the world on fire, to sweep prejudice, racism, and disrespect from the streets of Harlem. Edgar Westermann had been in public life nearly two decades by then, working his painstaking, compromising way from district leader to City Councilmember to Borough President, trading votes and influence for playground repairs, a reopened firehouse, a dental clinic. He’d been trying to tell himself for years now that Corrington was dancing the same dance, just with a different set of steps.

From the ambulance, the EMTs rattled out a gurney. The crowd’s attention swiveled that way. While Edgar stood weighing his choices, the NY1 News van rocketed around the corner. A cameraman jumped out and a reporter followed. Edgar turned back to Corrington. “You give Ms. Andersen my sympathy, and tell her I’ll be up as soon as she’s receiving.” Having discounted Corrington into a messenger, he spun on his heel and pushed back through the crowd to go meet the media.

City Hall

The mayor swept a glance over the conference room. “Where’s Virginia?” he barked.

“She’s aware of the meeting, Charlie.” Lena L’Nore, Charlie’s personal assistant since his Council days, spoke calmly. Lena was efficient, fiercely loyal, smooth with the press, and a hell of a looker. In fact, unless you counted as silly the faux-African spelling of her name, which the mayor would never be caught doing, she had no flaws.

The mayor was a flawed man himself and the first to admit it. Lena’s perfection could get on his nerves. He snapped, “That wasn’t the question.”

Lena did no more than raise an eyebrow. The mayor walked around her, poured himself coffee, and dropped into his chair. He always got his own coffee. He didn’t want to be accused of demeaning Lena’s professionalism. Not that she’d ever said a word, but years ago he’d overheard other Councilmembers’ secretaries muttering about their bosses. So he’d told Lena to knock off the coffee, she had better things to do. And for the price of a trip to the kitchenette, Councilmember Charlie Barr got known as a guy who respected women and the working class.

Now, from the head of the table, Mayor Charlie Barr moved his glare around the room.

Police Commissioner John Finn, large and ruddy, sat beside Lena, with another red-faced Irishman next to him: Ted O’Hare, the Chief of— what? Detectives? Department? Operations? Oh, hell, what did it matter? Everybody here had brought backup, and O’Hare was the guy Finn had chosen to hold his coat.

Les Farrell, Buildings Department Borough Superintendent for the Bronx, sat between O’Hare and Virginia McFee’s empty chair. Heavy and shaggily balding, Farrell was career Buildings Department. He’d come up through inspector, plan examiner, and all the ranks of Deputy Superintendent, and clearly wasn’t used to meetings where you had to wear a tie. The mayor impaled Farrell on his stare. Farrell swallowed and watched his own meaty hands play with a pen. “Said she’d be here.”

Down at the end of the table, Greg Lowry from DOI ripped a sugar packet open and said reasonably, “She’s got five minutes, Charlie.”

The clock ticked off another minute. “Four,” Charlie said. That was a damn technicality, though. All his people knew he wanted them in the room well before meeting time, so the jawing and coffee stirring would be done with when he got there. For him to beat one of them here was a problem, Sunday be damned.

The mayor swung his glare down to Greg Lowry but it bounced right off. Lowry’s reasonableness, like Lena’s perfection, could be irritating as hell. Clearly it grated on Lowry’s boss, DOI Commissioner Mark Shapiro. Shapiro sat to Lowry’s right, one chair closer to the mayor, wearing his usual frown.

Three years ago, when Charlie cleaned house after the Dolan Construction disaster, a half-dozen hats had been tossed in the ring for the Commissioner’s job at the Department of Investigation. Lowry, then DOI’s Inspector General for Sanitation, had thrown his first. Charlie had tapped Shapiro because putting a Jew in that job at that moment, like putting a black woman in Virginia’s spot, had been politically critical. But under other circumstances he’d have chosen Greg Lowry. Lowry was Charlie’s type, a quick thinker not afraid to take chances. Charlie told Shapiro to move Lowry from Sanitation to Buildings, make him Inspector General there. He knew Shapiro didn’t like it and Lowry wasn’t thrilled: to him it was a consolation prize. But Charlie also knew there’d be a spotlight on that job and Lowry could handle heat. After all, he’d spent pretty much his whole DOI career at Sanitation and come up smelling like a rose.

That was funny, and another time, Charlie would have snickered. Right now he was too pissed off.

The door opened and Virginia McFee strode into the room. “Sorry,” she said. “Bad traffic.” On Sunday? Charlie thought. Virginia had the smarts not to smile, but he caught her swapping a look with Lena. They made allies of each other, black women, or tried to. But everyone did the same, especially in New York. Jews, Latinos, Italians, Irish. No matter which side of an issue people were on, that connection could override logic and loyalty. If Charlie and Virginia were on a sinking ship and Lena had just one life preserver, she might very well toss it to Virginia.

And he didn’t suppose he’d blame her. It was natural, sticking to your own kind. Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Who the hell said that? Mark Twain? Robert Frost? Didn’t matter: It was just a good thing to remember, about your own people and everyone else’s.

Sitting, Virginia McFee took a Mont Blanc from her purse and held it poised. She looked expectantly at Charlie. The room was silent. Charlie, one eye on her and one on the clock, sat motionless until precisely ten.

Then he pounced: “Virginia, what the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know that anything’s going on, Charlie.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know. If nothing’s going on, prove it. If there is something, you’d better stop it. We can’t afford to go through this again.”

“Nothing is a hard thing to prove.”

“You expect me to say that to the press? Or do you want to?”

No answer.

Charlie spoke to them all. “You people were put in place after Dolan Construction so we could look New Yorkers in the eye and tell them that wouldn’t happen again. That it’s safe to walk past a construction site because we have departments and agencies whose job is to keep it safe. Then all of a sudden a scaffold collapses and five men are laid up. We got spontaneous combustion in a trailer and I’m visiting a firefighter in the hospital. Now we get a goddamn storm, bricks fly off a roof and suddenly three little kids are orphans! What the hell happened?”

He backed off slightly, a strategic moderation. “I hope and pray these were unrelated accidents, Virginia, of a type your inspectors couldn’t have prevented. Everyone hopes that. But you have to be able to prove it.”

“Exactly how, Charlie?”

If she were a white man, he’d have reamed her out for her tone alone. Instead, in a voice of immense forbearance, he said, “For one thing, you can prove your people went to the site. And if they found anything, they’d damn well better have gone back and reinspected. I want a mile-long paper trail.”

McFee looked pointedly at Farrell. Farrell’s eyes widened, as though it hadn’t occurred to him he’d be asked to speak.

“Since

” Farrell cleared his throat and started again. “Since the scaffold collapse two weeks ago, we’ve had inspectors on the Three Star site every day.”

“Why? You spot something wrong?”

“No,” Virginia McFee interposed. “That collapse looks like just an accident to us. But we know how seriously you take construction site safety, Mayor.”

“Go on, Mr. Farrell,” Charlie snapped.

“We sent three different guys,” Farrell said. “Rotating, so in case, you know? Found a couple things, routine. Point is, nothing related to the accidents.”

“Or nothing they reported.” That was Mark Shapiro, scowling.

Farrell shrugged. “Could be. But that trailer fire, we don’t inspect the trailers anyway, so who knows? And this brick thing

” He wiped his mouth with his thick fingers. “Storm came up Friday night. Some idiot might have put those loose bricks on the tarp as just, like, insurance, before they left. The inspector who saw that tarp earlier in the week swears it was weighed down with strapped bricks.”

“Strapped?” asked Charlie for the record, though he knew what it meant.

Farrell’s hand made a circle. “Steel straps around the pallet. If those bricks was piled on a pallet, even without a strap, they’d never have flown off like that.”

Charlie blew out a breath. “So what you’re telling us, Mr. Farrell, is that your men went there, you have reports, there was nothing wrong?”

Farrell nodded.

Virginia McFee said, “Well, Charlie, that’s what you wanted: nothing.”

Charlie looked deliberately away, down the table to his DOI Commissioner. “Mark?”

Grimly, as though it were a matter of life and death— and it had been for Harriet Winston, Charlie reminded himself, and could be politically for him— Mark Shapiro said, “We’re doing new background checks on the inspectors.”

“Please tell me those were done when these guys were hired.”

“Of course they were. And they checked out. But people change.”

Charlie had his own theory about that but this wasn’t the time. “What angles are you looking at?”

“A number,” said Shapiro. “One possibility, and the best, would be if these were three unrelated, unpreventable, purely coincidental accidents. Nothing the inspectors should have found.”

Out of the corner of his eye the mayor saw a tiny triumphant smile flicker on Virginia McFee’s lips, as though by stating this possibility Shapiro had proved it.

“Or?” he pressed.

“Accidents, but preventable if the inspectors had been doing their jobs. Or,” Shapiro said, “not accidents, but preventable: sabotage the inspectors missed, because they were born stupid or because they were paid to be.”

“That’s the theory the developer’s pushing,” Charlie said.

“Of course.”

“But who?” Charlie demanded. “Why? A union beef?”

“I don’t know. And frankly that theory’s least likely. But it’s one of those nothings I’d like to be able to prove.”

Virginia McFee shot daggers at Shapiro when he said that. The mayor wondered if she knew that the filler pump on her Mont Blanc could, if pressed right, squirt ink across the table and all over Shapiro’s white shirt.