The Big Dig

by Linda Barnes

  I ate steaming chili, listening to the thump of icy rain against the windows. I thought about calling Sam Gianelli, asking whether Norrelli Construction was a familiar name, how he was, was he married, what kind of money was the mob screwing out of the Dig. I’d had about a beer too many, I concluded. I played guitar, went to bed.

  Morning. I dressed in the dark, decided to concoct a sack lunch featuring leftover chili. I didn’t want to cement a lunch habit with Marian, and it seemed to me that the workers might be prompted to chit-chat about theft over lunch, once such traditional matters as who should play center field for the Red Sox dried up. Then, wouldn’t you know it, I couldn’t find the thermos. I knew I had one, red plastic with a wide mouth. The idea of eating cold chili sitting on the cold ground was definitely unappealing.

  By the time I found the thermos I was running late. I missed a train, the snow turned to slush—you get the idea—but when I rushed into the field office, primed with excuses, I found it deserted. I poked my head into the inner office, saw no one. Marian’s purse was visible in her half-opened desk drawer, but there was no evidence that either of the Horgans had been in, and O’Day was missing, too. I made a quick inventory of items on the Horgans’ desks. The photo smiled. The laptop was absent. A glossy brochure from the Artery Business Committee lay on top of a payroll form. I gave a quick tug at the top drawer of Gerry’s desk. It didn’t budge, but Liz’s opened easily. Her cell phone was gone.

  The lights were on, the alarm disengaged. I went back into the outer office, checked my watch against the clock on the microwave. Yesterday, in the same trailer at the same hour, I’d heard engines whine, jack-hammers sputter and jitter. Now, only the rush of distant traffic, speeding by. I parted the curtain over the stingy window, stood fixed for a moment, then grabbed a hard hat. It took seconds to kick off my shoes, stick my feet into heavy boots, shrug into my coat. I ran outside, taking the three cement steps in a leap.

  Yesterday, the site was a hive of activity wherever you looked, each person working at his own rhythm, each person part of a group that moved to a different beat. Now the site had little movement, a single focus. Knots of hard hats stood near the glory holes that pierced the decking, staring down into the pit, their breath rising in a cloud. I headed for the west scaffold steps and found myself blocked by the crowd.

  “Shit, looks bad.”

  “Is he moving?”

  “Where’s the fuckin’ EMTs?”

  Three had died on the Dig since Governor Weld smashed a bottle of champagne to begin work in December of ’91. One had been badly injured. Construction machinery was heavy and ornery, conditions hard and wintry. Acetylene torches burned, footing was treacherous. Still, workers were careful, safety officers wary. Thousands had died building the Panama Canal, hundreds on the Golden Gate Bridge. The Dig was a model site with an enviable record.

  An ambulance pulled to a whip-tailed halt, lights flashing. A man standing near the east scaffold semaphored his arms, yelled, “Bring a gurney!”

  I tucked myself into the crowd, edged closer to the nearest glory hole. No one descended the staircase and I wondered if it were blocked.

  A man said, “The way Horgan’s reaming out Charlie, you figure something went wrong with the scaffold?”

  “Charlie checks those fuckers every morning.”

  The EMTs were having trouble lowering their gear down the scaffolding. Hands grabbed it, eased it down. There was grumbling about how long the rescue was taking. There’d been drills, hadn’t these guys been paying attention? One site, they had to haul a man out in a clamshell bucket, by crane. This was fucking nothing, and look at the time it was taking!

  “Yeah, well, he ain’t movin’.”

  “Could be paralyzed.”

  “Yeah, look on the fucking bright side.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught Gerry Horgan, red-faced, shoving toward the ambulance, Liz behind him, breathing hard. The paramedics, aided by random workers, were lifting the stretcher, passing it hand to hand. A man was fastened to the gurney with orange straps. I tried to see his face but it stayed hidden behind heads, shoulders, hard hats. The gurney surfaced, and a name surged through the crowd, group to group, like a rushing breeze. Kevin Fournier.

  Watery blue eyes in the trailer. An urgent need to see Liz Horgan. I made tracks for the ambulance, too.

  The orange-clad paramedics were moving fast, rigging oxygen lines. The victim was strapped to a spinal board. I caught a glimpse of his head, partially wrapped in a sweatshirt hood, dark with blood. He ought to be bleeding more, I thought. Gushing blood, from a wound like that.

  O’Day, the site super, stood at Horgan’s left. He looked like he wanted to strike out, smash something. Liz Horgan clutched her husband’s hand, but he shook her off, pursuing the paramedics, yelling into a walkie-talkie. Liz touched O’Day’s shoulder, then started after Horgan. She looked as though she were about to be sick.

  “Can I help?” I cut her off at an angle of the fence. “Are you okay?”

  She stared at me blankly.

  “Carla,” I said.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said, more to herself than to me. “It’ll be okay.” Her teeth were chattering. She took a step, staggered, grabbed the fence to stay upright.

  Her husband was suddenly next to me. “You! Get her out of here! Get her some water or something, up at the trailer. Go on, Liz. Leave it to me. It’s gonna be okay, Liz.”

  “How?” she said softly. “How? With this—”

  “We’ll go to twenty-four/seven if we have to. We’ll do what we have to do.”

  “We’ll hire a night watchman.” Her voice was so low I barely made out the words. “We’ll hire him. Promise.”

  “Okay. Jesus Christ, okay.” His head was turned away from me; I couldn’t see his expression, but he sounded reluctant.

  She touched his shoulder. “Promise, Gerry.”

  “Okay, okay, Liz. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Promise,” she insisted.

  “Get her a blanket, too,” Horgan told me.

  I wanted to abandon her, find a way into the trench, examine footsteps, bloodstains, but such actions on the part of a secretary would be noted, questioned. Instead I ushered Mrs. H. into the trailer, my arm protectively circling her shoulders. She asked for aspirin. Her hand, when it touched mine, felt icy.

  She kept aspirin in her bottom desk drawer, she told me. I found it, grabbed a sweater off a hook in lieu of a blanket, wrapped the garment around her shaking shoulders. Her teeth were chattering so hard it took five minutes before she could manage the aspirin. If she hadn’t been there I’d have called Eddie. I no longer had any desire to quit my day job. I’d seen Kevin Fournier as he lay on the gurney. I thought he was probably dead, or dying.

  A dead man is a missing person, too.

  Chapter 10

  Through the window of the trailer I saw Horgan jump into the back of the ambulance with the injured man and a female EMT. Mass General was closest. I’d spent time there with my bullet wound. Mrs. Horgan, still shivering, clutched my hand and asked me to fetch Leland Walsh. I couldn’t find him, but used the break to alert Eddie via cell phone. I tried to get close enough to the accident site to take a few discreet photographs, but the scaffold staircase was guarded by grim orange-vested hard hats. Later Marian told me Walsh had gone to the hospital, too.

  Work didn’t stop for long. The east scaffold staircase remained closed, but the west staircase reopened quickly. Some grumbled about forging on so soon after a coworker had been lifted motionless from the trench, but no one walked off the job. Everyone knew that the project was a huge-bellied beast, that delay was costly. Marian rang project headquarters, assured me that they’d run with the ball, notifying insurers, OSHA, the Turnpike Authority. Marian and I started to assemble photocopies of weekly safety-inspection charts. The phone started ringing and didn’t stop: reporters; OSHA; the chief safety officer. Charlie Perez, the site safety officer, argued fiercely with Harv
O’Day. In the midst of chaos, Liz Horgan, recovered and working, sent over coffee and Danish for the trailer staff, and even Marian was touched and grateful.

  “Accident” was the only term I heard when I ate lunch on the cold ground with a bunch of laborers. Rotten fucking luck. So far behind, and now this. Getting to be a bad luck site. I tried to guide the conversation toward Kevin Fournier, what he’d been like, who his friends were, but the group drifted into awkward silence. No one wanted to speak ill of Kevin, which meant they weren’t optimistic about his recovery. Some of the workers had seen his injuries from a closer vantage point than I had, but no one, it seemed, had seen him fall. There was no rousing chorus of what-a-great-guy-Kevin-was. No one claimed to be a friend, to know his family. He wasn’t married, I gathered from remarks about numerous, hot-looking girlfriends. Good football player, somebody said. Liked a bet.

  I half-expected Eddie to show up. When he didn’t, I rang him again and arranged an evening meeting. Marian had trouble getting through to the hospital, figured hard hats were flooding the line with cell calls. She sent me to spread the word that she’d act as liasion, phoning every half hour, letting people know if Fournier’s condition changed. It was initially described as grave, which meant he’d gotten there alive. It didn’t improve during the long afternoon. It couldn’t have worsened; in hospital-speak there was no term more perilous than grave.

  I left at three o’clock, quitting time for secretaries, frustrated but feeling that there was nothing else I could do. I wasn’t Fournier’s next-of-kin; I couldn’t waltz into his hospital room and check out his injuries up close. I wasn’t a city official who could slap a “stop work” order on the site, or a bigshot Dig manager who could demand an immediate investigation. I wasn’t a cop working an attempted homicide, and I wasn’t a solo operative either. Eddie had warned me to stay undercover and keep my nose clean. Still, I might not have torn myself away if I hadn’t had a second job, a scheduled appointment.

  It should have involved viewing Veronica James’s room, but it didn’t. Dana Endicott, in New York on unexpected business, had left neither a key nor a firm date for her return, simply a message on my answering machine. The delay annoyed me; I don’t like to skip steps. I wondered what the rich landlady had done with the dogs, whether she’d entrusted them to Rogers Walters and Charles River Dog Care.

  I didn’t go home to change, didn’t have time. I stopped to fill the gas tank, stuck a Robert Johnson CD in the deck, and tried to let the thumping bass of the Delta blues soothe my mind. Driving usually helps me unwind, but images from the Dig tensed my fingers on the steering wheel—the swaying gurney in the shadowy light, the man who’d removed his hard hat and crossed himself as the injured man was carried by, the tense faces of the workers at lunch. Why had no one seen Fournier fall, heard him cry out?

  Tewksbury, Veronica James’s childhood home, twenty-two miles from Boston, used to be poor folks’ farm country, but few of the old spreads remain and much of the rocky ground is occupied by treeless subdivisions. The Jameses lived near the town center, a crossroads with a village green and a steepled clapboard church, in a Cape-style house with a saggy porch and weathered gray paint. I didn’t see a doorbell so I knocked.

  The woman who opened the door had no sparkle left in her brown eyes. She stared at me as though I were about to deliver bad news. I gave my name instead, reminded her that we’d spoken on the phone.

  “We don’t have to talk to you. You’re not the police.”

  “That’s right. May I come in?” The low-ceilinged foyer smelled of mothballs. There was noise coming from somewhere, chirpy little jingles from a distant TV.

  “Well, Jack—that’s my husband—he’s in the back room. It’s kind of a mess. He’s been off sick, but then, you wouldn’t know that.”

  Vague. Dana Endicott had described her phone conversation with Veronica’s mother as vague and uninformative. “I don’t mind about the mess.”

  She shrugged and stepped aside. The vestibule emptied into a front room with an aged, overstuffed plaid couch. There were doilies on the sofa arms and chair backs, a cross-bound Jesus on the wall. The room into which she led me was an add-on larger than the living room, and the fifty inches of gleaming color screen at one end looked more like a religious shrine than the front-room Jesus did. Two fat armchairs were positioned like movie seats, a snack table between them. The man in the righthand chair was watching Jeopardy and the volume was loud.

  Veronica’s dad was easily twenty years older than her mom. Pale and puffy, he looked like the act of raising a potato chip to his lips was his idea of vigorous exercise. His chair was in the reclining position, elevating veiny feet encased in furry slippers.

  “Company, Jack,” the woman yelled over the TV blare.

  “What? Who’s that?”

  “That Carlyle woman come to ask about Veronica.”

  He regarded me with irritation and reached for the remote. If he could have pressed a button to make me disappear instead of the game show host, I’d have dissolved in a puff of smoke.

  “The hell you want?”

  “You get good sound on that set,” I said admiringly.

  He sniffed a little, nodded. Sixties, salt-and-pepper hair, grizzled patch on his chin, not quite a goatee, but trying. “You wanna talk, then sit down, the both of you. Go on now, Helen. Why you standing up so I have to gawk?” He craned his head at me. “I hurt my back. Makes me goddam irritable.”

  Helen hovered till I lowered myself onto a small settee. Then she took her place in her big armchair.

  “What’s all the fuss about Ronni anyway?” the man said. “She’s over twenty-one. It’s a free country, last time I looked.”

  “Certainly is,” I agreed. “I just want to make sure I get a balanced viewpoint, include your input about your daughter.”

  “I have four daughters, four, grown and gone. Two married, one at Fitchburg State—sophomore this year—besides Ronni. Plus four grandchildren.” He waved an arm at the framed photos on the side wall, relentlessly posed high school graduation shots mingled with Sears kiddie candids of the grandchildren. The frames were identical dime-store brass, and there were rectangular spots on the wallpaper that spoke of rearrangement as more grandkids came along. “Now our Elsie’s here at least three times a week, always stays for supper. Helen looks after the boys while she shops.”

  “Can you point out Veronica for me?”

  “One in the low-cut blouse,” he said disapprovingly.

  The mother made a noise. “I told her to wear something with a nice collar, but she said all the girls were wearing those V-neck things.”

  Veronica, on the lower right, wore her hair sleek and dark, parted to the left, hanging artlessly around a thin face. Her eyes, too big for her face, were dark as well. They stared somewhere over the photographer’s left shoulder. While I studied the photo, Mrs. James prattled on about Veronica’s high school wardrobe, how she always wore black or white, while Mrs. James preferred pretty colors, just like her oldest, Elsie, did.

  “Hell.” Mr. James’s outburst stopped her cold. “Hell’s just the first part of my wife’s name—it’s not like I’m swearing all the time.” He gave me a look that said I ought to appreciate his subtle humor, so I contorted my face in what I hoped was the right kind of grin. “Let’s get this over with. What do you want to know about Veronica?”

  “I take it she doesn’t visit as often as Elsie.”

  Helen James looked up from picking invisible lint off her skirt. “Once, maybe twice a month.”

  “Is she regular about visits?”

  “Not really. She comes around birthdays, anniversaries.”

  “Last weekend, the weekend her landlady expected her to stay here, was that somebody’s birthday?”

  Her eyebrows were brown, but her hair was platinum, straw dry, badly bleached. She shook her head. “No. Our Elsie’s oldest boy had a big party three weeks ago. Six years old. Lovely party. Had a magician and all, made those
cute animal balloons.”

  “Was Veronica at the party?”

  “Yes, but she hardly stayed.”

  “And you weren’t expecting her at all last weekend.”

  “Well, the girls know they can always come home. Our door’s always open. Once there was trouble with her husband, and our daughter moved—”

  “Hel, that’s none of her business.”

  “Jack, I’m only saying Ronni knows she can come home without arranging for it in advance.”

  “Well, it’s nice for me to know ahead of time,” he said. “Not like it’s a hotel.”

  “When did Veronica leave home? Go off on her own?” I glanced at Helen, but it was Jack who answered.

  “Out of high school one day, out the door the next. Big city girl in a two-bit town. Says she has to live somewhere she can see a new movie every night. Now, our Elsie lived right here all the way through college.”

  I was starting to hate Elsie. I’d already decided on her photo, the one with the stuck-up nose and superior sneer.

  “Jayme lived here till she married, too, but little Jackie, she wanted to try the dorm this year. Jackie’s our youngest.” He sounded fond of Jackie.

  “Which daughter is Veronica?”

  Helen said, “You know, I always thought she’d study hard, be a vet. She’s a smart one, she is, but it’s always animals with her. Momma, can I bring home the hamster, the rabbit, whatever they’re keeping at the school.”

  “Hel, this lady doesn’t care a fig about those damn animals.”

  “Jack, reason that woman’s all upset is Ronni left her dog.”

  “Yeah, well, she can afford to feed the damn thing. What’s the difference, three mutts or four? She’s a damned busybody is what she is. I mean, think about it. Veronica’s a pretty girl. I’m not saying she’s an angel, maybe she’s a little wild. She goes out, and that woman wants me to report her missing? Hell, I’m lodge brothers with half the police officers in town. Half the girls in town are shacked up with some man not their husband. I’m not shocked by it anymore, even if I do think some of them ought to be horsewhipped. If you raise a child right, they’ll turn out right, that’s what I always say.” His face was reddening.