The Concrete Pearl (12 page)

I couldn’t have been driving the Concrete Pearl for more than ten seconds when another set of headlamps appeared in my rearview. The halogen headlamps looked like a pair of bright white glowing eyes. The eyes stayed with me, the unidentified vehicle on my tail while I motored the open-topped Jeep the full two miles to my apartment complex.

This time I wasn’t going to try and duck my stalker.

By the time I pulled into the lot, my pulse was pounding in my temples, my palms moist against the rubber-coated steering wheel. I wished I had Tommy with me.

Pulling into my designated space, I killed the engine. The vehicle pulled up directly behind me, the now too close rearview headlamp reflection blinding me.

A sea change occurred then.

Fear turned into anger.

I pulled the equalizer out from under the bucket seat. I squeezed the rubber grip, threw open the Jeep door, got out.

I faced the stalker head on.

Chapter 24

At first, I saw only a silhouette standing beside the car. A dark shadow against the dim streetlamp light. I recognized the car as a compact but pricey Lexus two-door. The dark figure I did not. Until she spoke.

“Take it easy,” she said in her state-of-Virginia voice.

I felt the weight of the top-heavy claw hammer drop to my side, the sharp claws brushing up against my knee.

I said, “Aren’t you breaking the rules of engagement, Diana? Following me around like that?”

I remembered Joel’s order not to make direct communication with the Tiger Lady. Too late now. My former Harrison co-worker took a step forward, smooth red hair and trim body glowing in the inverted arc of sodium lamp light.

“I come as an old friend,” she said. “Off the record…My Lord, I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” When she said “Lord” it sounded like “
Laward
.”

I knew by now not to trust her friendly air. I also knew something else: to deny her the face time she wanted, off the record or not, would be to bury myself even deeper.

“Old friend,” I said like a question, squeezing the rubber hammer grip.

“I’ve never stopped liking you, Spike,” she said. “It’s just that I have to do my job to the best of my ability. Innocent lives depend upon it.”

Turning, I opened the Jeep door, slid the equalizer back beneath the driver’s seat, head first. Shutting the door I shoved the keys into the right-hand pocket of my leather jacket.

“Still carrying around your trusty equalizer I see?” Diana asked.

I didn’t give her the benefit of an answer. Besides, she already knew the answer. Instead I told her she’d better park in the visitor’s lot across the green.

“I’m apartment 1-R, bottom floor,” I said.

“I know,” she said, turning back for the Lexus.

Isn’t that just like the Tiger Lady… Always one step ahead of me
.

Chapter 25

I recalled the first job Diana did for Harrison. We were the low bidder on a General Electric Company project to build their brand new state-mandated waste water treatment facility. It was a big job requiring the construction of footings and foundations for eight separate fifty-thousand gallon tanks—the identical make and style of the steel tanks you might find inside an oil refinery.

My father was worried.

His bid had come in more than two-hundred thousand less than the next lowest bid. A discrepancy of more than ten percent. No matter how many times he checked and rechecked his bid sheet, he could find no errors. The problem, he thought, had to lie in working with the tanks themselves. There must have been something about those tanks the competition knew and he didn’t. Something complicated and time consuming about their installation.

Dad looked like a lost soul, standing in the middle of the office floor, scratching his receding gray-haired head, eyeglasses sliding off his nose. He just could not put a finger on his estimating mistake, other than the fact that he had never worked with big ass tanks before.

Neither had Diana.

But that didn’t stop the headstrong woman from tapping into her sharp mind. She brought up the fact that the challenge wouldn’t arise in the handling and construction of the tanks themselves (the steel erection subcontractor would handle that), it was coming up with the required radius for the circular concrete foundations that had to be poured to precise specifications. The margin of error would be measured in millimeters, not centimeters or inches.

“That’s why the other bids are too high,” she pointed out, eyes glassy with excitement. “The other GCs lack confidence. They’re worried about getting the foundations wrong. They all loaded their bids up with a shit load of contingency money.”

My father shook his head, unable to hide his blushing face. For a lifer construction pro, he would never get comfortable with the gutter language the rest of us loved so fucking dearly.

“You’re sure about this?” he said.

“I know all about padding a bid,” Diana smiled devilishly, that south-of-the-border drawl affording her words a touch of the devil.

She then pulled a piece of blank paper from the copier. She had an idea. Taking pencil to paper, she drew out a series of circles on the paper. First a half circle, then another half circle butting up against it to make a completed three-hundred-sixty degree circle. The idea would be to create circular templates out of plywood. Build them in segments off site according to the steel tank specifications, then ship them into the construction area. When the riverside site was properly cleared, we would hire a couple of union millwrights to set the plywood templates on level compacted earth and then set the concrete forms into position according to them. The concrete would be poured in a perfect circular shape while the anchor bolts would be set with zero margin of error.

Diana’s idea not only worked, Harrison construction crews completed the Waste Water Treatment facility in record time, netting my father a low six-figure profit. It was a feather in Diana’s cap, but an even larger feather for the Harrison Construction reputation. The General Electric Company wrote a letter of testimonial on our behalf, stating that the Waste Water Treatment facility was one of the most flawless projects ever undertaken at the Hudson River plant.

Diana not only received a major raise, my father bought her a new car.

She was also the recipient of a new nickname. From that point on that she was looked up to as the gutsy, hard headed, “Tiger Lady” of Harrison Construction.

That was then.

Now we sat across from one another at a round metal café table that barely fit inside my galley kitchen. I nursed a beer while Diana sipped a cup of hot tea. She was wearing a knee-length skirt and a navy cotton button-down for a top. No jewelry—OSHA rules. Befitting a woman of about fifty, her thick hair was cut shoulder length but still lush and somehow elegant. On occasion, she brushed it back with the fingers on her right hand.

We locked eyes from across the tiny table.

“Mind if I smoke?” she said, pulling a pack of Marlboro Lights from her small black shoulder bag.

“Violation of OSHA rules,” I said. “How curious.”

“Perhaps even ironical,” she said, holding up the cig as if waiting for my permission.

I shot a quick glance over my right shoulder. The window above the kitchen sink was wide open.

“Can’t argue with ironical,” I said.

She smiled and set the cig between her lips.

“Let’s have it,” I said. “How’d you know I’d be at Thatcher Street?”

She lit up with a Bic lighter, exhaled a cloud of blue smoke.

“My office is housed in the old EnCon building on upper Pearl. I was heading home when I spotted your Jeep.”

In my mind I saw the Harrison Construction logo printed on the side panel—the R’s formed by a graphic representation of inverted ninety-degree civil engineer’s rulers.

You can run, Spike…But you cannot hide…Wish I could say the same for you Jimmy.

“You were following me earlier too,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Not me.”

“Okay whatever, but you decide to follow me to Thatcher Street and instead of coming inside?”

“Not my kind of place,” she smiled.

A jab.

“I like it,” I lied. “No one bothers me there.”

She squinted trimmed brows like I was messing with her.

“Why’d you come here?” I asked.

She worked up a false smile.

“I’m worried about you. PS 20 is a disaster; a major health hazard and major safety risk.”

I laughed.

“You’re worried,” I said. “Three major OSHA penalties in the past nine months alone, and now you red-flag the school.”

“I have no choice but to enforce the safety of all the jobsites that fall under my jurisdiction,” she said, the smile now wiped off her face. “We both share in that responsibility.”

“I’ve done nothing but comply with OSHA regs,” I said out the corner of my mouth. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you and your agency have been harassing me.”

She shook her head, stamped out her cig.

She said, “You don’t believe a word of what you just said, do you?”

I stared into my beer bottle. I wasn’t sure what to believe.

“Back to my original question,” I said. “Why are you here?”

Lifting her mug off the table, she drew a small sip of tea, ran an open hand through her hair, once more painting that smile on her mouth.

“I’ve come to offer my help,” she said.

“You want to help, call off the dogs. Or at the very least, call the situation what it is: Farrell’s personal screw up.”

Another shake of her head, hair moving around her narrow face like a red wave.

“I can’t do that and you know it.” Making like a pistol with her right hand; aiming the barrel at me. “You hired him.”

“We talking off the record?”

“Sure.”

“What if I’m able to locate Farrell, somehow convince him to come back with me to face the charges of negligence directly? Would that take the heat off me?”

She cocked her head, open eyes glowing in the dim light spilling down from the old ceiling-mounted fixture.

“I don’t see how it couldn’t. But he’d have to be willing to own up to everything, from cheating on the asbestos removals to rigging IAQ test samples to deceiving you to running away from it all.”

I might have mentioned the issue of running away with the Albany School Board’s two-hundred-plus grand, plus my ten. But extortion was out of OSHA’s jurisdiction.

Diana smiled, wry, inquisitive.

“You’re not serious about going after him,” she said in the form of a question. “You’d never find him. And even if you did, he’d never take responsibility, short of putting a gun to his head.”

The Tiger Lady was right on the money.

“So why are you here?”

“The team of project principals meets with your lawyer tomorrow. I’ll be there. So will the Albany County DA”

My stomach tightened up.

“I suspect the press will be there too,” Diana continued. “TV and print press have already been hounding me. Especially Ms. Collins at Channel 13.” She pronounced “Ms.” like
Meeaazz
.

In my head I had a sharp vision of the shapely, mini-skirted reporter.

“Do yourself a favor. Show up to the meeting. Tell the truth. Plead your case but apologize for unknowingly hiring a bad sub. Admit that the school is entirely contaminated, uninhabitable, perhaps beyond help. Your contrition will be taken very seriously.”

“In other words,” I said, “you want me to plead guilty to negligence and you want me to do it in front of the county prosecutor. I’m not so sure my lawyer would go for it.”

She stood up from the table.

“It’s your only hope and Joel Clark knows it. Your only way out of this while retaining some dignity for you and Harrison Construction.”

“What exactly can you promise me if I were to show up and make this…ah…little public act of contrition?”

“I can’t promise anything. But what I can do is push for the most minimal fine possible.”

My heart pounded. So loud even she had to hear it through flesh and bone.

“I’ll take your advice into consideration.”

Biting her bottom lip, Diana picked her mug up off the table, carried it to the sink, set it down.

“Thank you for the tea,” she said in her polite faux south-of-the-border twang. Suddenly she seemed eager to leave. “Sorry I couldn’t come up with better news.”

She walked out of the kitchen, into the living area, taking the keys to the Lexus off the table, holding them in her hand.

I said, “One more heavy fine and Harrison will be dead and buried.”

She nodded sadly and headed for the back terrace door. But before she stepped out, she took notice of a framed picture of Jordan I kept on the upper eye-level shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase.

She paused silently, reflectively.

Until she said, “You must really miss him.” This time when she spoke, there was no hint of Virginia drawl.

In the photograph Jordan was dressed in his blue jean work shirt, worn Levis, brown suede cowboy boots. He wore a red and black Harrison hardhat on his head. He was standing atop the tracks of a large yellow CAT dozer that had just moved a couple tons of earth into a massive pile. We had only been engaged for a few days when I’d snapped the shot of him with my digital.

“Every minute of every day,” I said, eyes locked on his.

She bit her lip, nodded. As she gazed at Jordan’s image, she seemed to be a million miles away, along with her own thoughts of my deceased husband.

Until she turned back to me.

“Please peel away your stubborn skin. Show up alongside your lawyer tomorrow. I promise I’ll do everything in my power to see that you receive a fair and balanced hearing.”

With that statement, the old Diana had returned. When she said “fair and balanced” it came out in a kind of subtle drawl that would go unnoticed in Virginia, but that in Albany stuck out like an amputated digit. No matter. Just looking into her face, I got the feeling she meant every word of what she said.