[Boston Law 01.0] Unlawful Deeds

by David S. Brody

Bruce thought for a moment, then dialed Pierre’s home number. Carla answered on the fourth ring. “Hi, Carla, this is Bruce Arrujo. I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”

  “No, not at all.” Her tone was formal, distant. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, first of all, I just wanted to check in and see how things are. See if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  There was a slight pause before she responded. Bruce half-expected an answer like: “You’ve done enough already.” Instead, he got: “Thanks for asking, but we’re all set.”

  “How’s Pierre doing?”

  “As well as could be expected. We’re hoping he’s home by Christmas, but it may not be until January or February.”

  “That really is just around the corner. So keep hanging in there.”

  Carla didn’t respond, so Bruce continued. “While I’ve got you on the phone, do you by chance have the vacancy decontrol certificates for Fenway Place? They’re the ones issued by the Boston Rent Equity Board that prove the units aren’t under rent control. Howie thinks Pierre left them in the safe deposit box.”

  “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Howie’s right—I’m pretty sure Pierre put them in the safe deposit box before he ... left.”

  “That would make sense. He probably got them from Felloff, and they’re the only set of originals. Howie thinks—and I agree—that the new property manager should have them. Especially since there’s only one set, and the Rent Equity Board will only take originals or certified copies of the originals. They say there’s too much risk of forgery.”

  Again, no response from Carla. Bruce took a deep breath. “So would you mind if I swung by and grabbed them? I wouldn’t ask you to come all the way downtown, and I don’t want to trust them to a delivery service.”

  “Howie asked you to get them?”

  “Yes.” She would call Howie to confirm, no doubt. It was clear she didn’t trust him; he would have to be careful.

  “I can get them from the bank and meet you here tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock.”

  “Perfect. Thanks, Carla.”

  Bruce put the phone down, stood up and stretched. He would spend another eight or nine hours opening mail, returning phone calls, and meeting with other lawyers at the firm that had worked on his cases in his absence. But his work for the day was done.

  * * *

  Bruce left the office at seven o’clock, grabbed a sandwich on his way home, then began preparations for the evening. As a child, Halloween had always been his favorite day of the year. No chance that his parents would forget it, like they sometimes did his birthday, and no reason to jealously eye his brother’s Christmas presents. Halloween evened the playing field: In their masks, all children were treated equally.

  As a teenager, too old to trick or treat, he had begun a yearly tradition of putting on a Werewolf mask and prowling the streets—jumping out from behind bushes to scare people, howling to the moon in front of churches, flying off of sidewalks and onto the hoods of stopped cars.

  Gus—who never passed on an opportunity to make insights into Bruce’s psyche—once observed that Bruce enjoyed Halloween so much because it was the one day during the year when he could take his mask off. Bruce remembered Gus’ words: “Most of us are just people 364 days a year who get to dress up and act like monsters on the 365th day. You’re the opposite. You’re a monster who has to dress up and act like a human being for 364 days. Finally, on Halloween, you get to let your real self out.”

  Bruce always thought Gus was overstating it a bit. But, at this very moment in his life, he needed to be the monster that would not die, a creature that could survive a mortal wound and return to avenge that attack.

  He would hunt down his enemy, haunt him like the ghouls and demons of a feverish nightmare.

  * * *

  [November 1, 1990]

  Bruce arrived the next afternoon in front of Pierre’s condominium building a few minutes before four o’clock, as he and Carla had arranged. He rang the bell and identified himself, and Carla buzzed the front door open.

  He walked up one flight of stairs; she had partially opened the front door to the unit and was waiting for him. Even holding another man’s baby, Carla was an alluring woman, and Bruce had to force his brain to stop remembering that her husband had been in jail for the last couple of months. “Hi Carla. And that must be Valerie; she’s a beautiful little girl.”

  “Thanks.” Valerie buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” Valerie shook her head side-to-side, her little blond curls bobbing with every shake.

  Bruce filled the awkward silence. “That’s okay. It’s probably good that she’s a bit afraid of strangers.”

  “Actually, she generally likes strangers.” Carla lifted her eyes from Valerie and looked at Bruce, deep into his eyes. The three of them were still standing at the front door of the apartment.

  Bruce chuckled lightly, knowing it sounded forced. “Well, you know what they say: Kids and dogs are the best judges of character.”

  Carla started to turn away from Bruce to re-enter the apartment, then stopped. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t have a chance to get to the bank today. I tried calling your office, but you had already left. Could you come back tomorrow? I’ll have them for you then.”

  Bruce felt his hand clench into a fist, and stuffed it into his pocket before Carla could see it. “Yeah, sure, whatever. After lunch okay, say two o’clock?”

  “Fine.”

  “See you then. Bye Valerie.” Bruce tried to wave to Valerie, but Carla had already closed the door.

  * * *

  Bruce took the subway back to Pierre and Carla’s apartment the next afternoon. If Carla refused to produce the certificates, he would have to come up with a back-up plan. He went into the foyer area, started to ring the bell, and saw a package propped up against the side wall with his name on it. He bent over and picked up a large brown envelope, with a note taped to the front. He read it: Bruce—I had to run out. Here they are.—Carla.

  He tore the package— thumbed through the stack of vacancy decontrol certificates. It looked like all 245 were there, one for each unit. He pumped his fist. Thank you, Carla. I doubted you for a moment there.

  He crammed the package into his briefcase, made sure the case was locked, and jogged two blocks to the main street. He quickly flagged a taxi. “City Hall please. Boston, not Brookline. Right in Government Center.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Bruce hopped out of the cab and onto the brick surface of City Hall Plaza. The autumn wind whipped across the barren plaza, and Bruce blew on his fingers to keep them warm. He remembered how he had welcomed the cold the previous winter at the Marlborough Street foreclosure sale, how the other bidders had suffered as Bruce had used the cold as a weapon against them. The stakes were much lower then.

  He entered City Hall and took the elevator to the seventh floor. He went down one hallway, then another, before he finally found the Rent Equity Board at the end of a third. Even finding these maggots is impossible, never mind dealing with them. Bruce took a deep breath to calm himself—these were the same people who had killed Grandpa.

  He found a clerk sitting behind a desk, waited for the man to look up from his newspaper. The clerk weighed close to four hundred pounds, and even the act of lifting his head seemed to tire him. “May I help you?” he wheezed at Bruce. Bruce could see the residue of lunch wedged between the man’s teeth. These people truly were parasites.

  “Yes. I would like to make certified copies of these documents.” A certified copy was simply a copy of a document that included a certification—usually in the form of a governmental seal or a stamp—that the document was an accurate copy of the original. Bruce held up the decontrol certificates. “There are 245 vacancy decontrol certificates in here. I would like certified copies of all 245.”

  The clerk dropped his head back down and paused, as if re-marshaling his strength for more conversation. After a few seconds
, he looked back up at Bruce. “Costs a dollar a page. We only take cash.”

  Bruce opened up his wallet—he had $40. “Can you start making the copies while I go to the bank?”

  The clerk shook his head slowly from side to side, then rested for a moment. “Sorry. I have to have the money first. Told the same thing to a lady yesterday, and she had a crying baby with her. It’s office policy.”

  Bruce was tempted to grab the clerk by his jowls and twist his head off. He didn’t give a damn what the fat slug did yesterday. He fought again to stay calm, not wanting to make a scene that would cause the clerk to remember him. “I understand. I’ll be back in ten minutes. You’ll still be here?” It was Friday, and Bruce didn’t want to wait until after the weekend to complete this task.

  The clerk looked around the room, skeptical that there could be anything that could induce him to lift himself from his chair. “I’ll be here.”

  Ten minutes later, Bruce handed over $245 and a stack of decontrol certificates. The clerk reached out slowly to take them, rotated himself in his chair, and put the cash and the documents on a shelf behind him. He rang a bell, rotated back around, took a deep breath and dropped his chin back onto his chest. Apparently another clerk, on the other side of the shelf, had responsibility for actually making the certified copies. Or maybe there were two other clerks—one to make the copies, and another to certify them.

  Bruce decided it would be best if he just left the room. He waited in the hallway with a magazine.

  * * *

  An hour later, Bruce was on his way home with 245 original certificates and 245 certified copies. It wasn’t even four o’clock. He would return to the office later, but for his next task he didn’t want to risk being interrupted.

  He turned left off Cambridge Street and walked up Beacon Hill along one of the side streets on the eastern face of the Hill. These streets were comprised almost entirely of nineteenth century rowhouses, usually brick or brownstone. Bruce’s apartment was a small one—one room plus a bathroom—on the fourth floor of a brick rowhouse located near the foot of the Hill. Real estate agents liked to refer to these top-floor apartments as “penthouse” units, but anybody who knew anything about Victorian-era architecture knew that the top floors of these buildings were actually the least desirable ones. The buildings were originally built for single family occupancy, with the ground floor used for cooking and cleaning, the parlor level for entertaining, and the upper floors for sleeping quarters for the family and servants. Since the second floor was where the master bedrooms were located, it was, like the parlor level, ornately constructed and detailed. The third floor contained the children’s bedrooms and was less ornate. The top floor, however, housed the servants—the ceilings on this floor were low, there were no decorative moldings or carvings, the windows were small, and instead of mantled fireplaces small coal stoves heated the rooms. Not to mention the three flights of stairs.

  But the apartment was affordable, and it offered Bruce the convenience of being located less than a five minute walk from both his office building downtown and the sailing club on the Charles River. And it had a door that Bruce could secure from the inside with a thick dead bolt.

  Bruce swept aside the clutter on the apartment’s only table—an old farmer’s table he inherited from Grandpa—and took the original vacancy decontrol certificates out of his briefcase. He left the certified copies in the case. He made sure the table was clean, then placed the stack of certificates in front of him. He examined them closely—he knew what he wanted to do, he just didn’t know how to do it.

  The certificates were one-page documents consisting primarily of pre-printed form language attesting to the fact that the Board had conducted a hearing and had determined that the unit in question had been found to have been voluntarily vacated by the tenant and was therefore now “decontrolled”—that is, no longer under rent control. At the top of the form there was a blank spot for the building address and apartment number to be inserted; at the bottom was a blank for the date and blank lines for the signatures of the Board members who officiated at the hearing.

  Bruce thumbed through the stack of certificates. He noticed that all but twenty or thirty of them were dated the same date, April 28, 1986. This was not uncommon—typically a developer would purchase a building with many rent control tenants and “buy out” the tenants by paying them ten or even twenty thousand dollars each. The developer would then file decontrol applications for these units and for any other units that had been vacated voluntarily in the previous few years. Since the landlord could charge market rent on the newly decontrolled units prior to obtaining the decontrol certificates as long as he deposited the rents into an escrow account, often these decontrol applications were filed in bulk and were handled together at a single hearing to save time and money on attorney's fees.

  Bruce also noticed that, while the signatures of the Board members were made by blue signature stamps, the date was written in by hand on each certificate. The person who had performed this task—Bruce could not help but picturing the hulking, wheezing clerk hunched over a stack of certificates—had apparently quickly grown impatient with the drudgery, because the “6” in “1986” was penned in such a way that the tail was not fully looped. That is, the bottom part of the “6” looked somewhat like the bottom of a “C.”

  It was just the type of opening Bruce was looking for.

  The certificates were dated in blue ink, so Bruce pulled a blue Bic pen from his briefcase. He didn’t actually care if the ink matched exactly, but he tested the Bic on some scrap paper to make sure the colors were not dissimilar. He then took the certificates and, one by one, added an elliptical line, joining the semi-looped portion of the bottom of the “6” with the point at the top of the “6.” The effect was to turn the “6” into a “0,” so that the date read “1980” instead of “1986.” After completing a dozen or so, Bruce stopped and inspected his work. At a casual glance, the change went unnoticed. But on close examination, especially with a magnifying glass, it was apparent that somebody had tampered with the documents.

  Bruce completed the alterations on the documents, put the documents in his briefcase, and looked at his watch. Almost 5:30. He called information, requested the number for Beacon Management, and phoned their offices. “Yes, how late do you stay open in the evening?”

  “Somebody will be here at least until six o’clock, sir.”

  “And what is your address?”

  The woman gave Bruce an address on Boylston Street, in the Back Bay. A fifteen-minute walk for Bruce. Plus ten more to stop at the copy center around the corner to make copies of the altered certificates.

  Bruce re-opened his briefcase and located a letter he had typed earlier in the day at his office. It was a cover letter from him addressed to Beacon Management, enclosing the Fenway Place vacancy decontrol certificates they had requested from Howie Plansky. Bruce took the letter, placed it on top of the stack of the altered original certificates, put everything into a large brown envelope, grabbed his jacket and went out to make a delivery.

  CHAPTER 55

  [November 5, 1990]

  The altered vacancy decontrol certificates were like a cannon pointed directly at the ship of the owner of the Fenway Place project. He had loaded that cannon four days ago with the alterations to the date. Now all he needed was somebody to light the fuse.

  He spent a few hours in the office Monday morning, then at lunch walked over to the Suffolk County Courthouse. Using an alias, he requested the entire file for Civil Case Number 89-1962, Charese Galloway v. Roberge Krygier. Somewhere in the hundreds of pages of court pleadings, he hoped he would glean a piece of information that would lead him to his fuse-lighter.

  He began by making a list of the players in this almost comically tragic case. Under each name, he left three or four lines of blank space. His goal today was to fill these spaces with information about each of the players: Who were they? Why were they involved in the case? What did they
hope to accomplish? What were they afraid of? In short, what were their hot buttons, and how could Bruce push them?

  He started with the key players. Even though Charese was dead, he began the exercise with her. She was easy. She wanted revenge against Roberge, and she wanted money. She may also have been trying to re-claim some self-esteem. All of these would have been easy buttons to push. Except she was now dead.

  He moved on to Roberge. Bottom line for him: He wanted to go on as if the whole Charese chapter of his life never occurred. He initially had simply ignored the complaint, and it looked to Bruce as if he might have continued to ignore it had a team of high-priced lawyers not suddenly appeared on his behalf. And even they were probably hired by his father. Bruce guessed that Roberge would have been happy to write a check to be rid of the whole sordid mess, especially since the check would be drawn on Daddy’s bank account. He looked to Bruce like a classic rich boy who never developed the skills necessary to function in society. Now that Charese was dead, Roberge was probably praying that the case died with her. Obvious buttons to push: Make noise about resurrecting the case; cause Daddy to cut him off; threaten to disturb whatever heterosexual bliss existed in his young marriage.

  Bruce already knew a lot about Wesley Krygier, just from reading the papers. Bruce could see his silent hand in the hardball tactics Roberge’s lawyers were playing. But Bruce could also see the desperation of a proud man trying to maintain and preserve the dignity of his family name. Bruce smiled to himself as he read through Roberge’s attorneys’ repeated requests—all of which were denied—that the court take steps to make the proceedings confidential. For Wesley Krygier, this case wasn’t about winning or losing, it was about publicity. If his son lost the case, it might cost a few hundred grand. But the publicity could cost the family both its name and its fortune. So, Bruce wondered, why hadn’t Krygier simply settled the case?

  The answer, Bruce concluded, had more to do with issues of rent control than with the particulars of the Charese-Roberge love affair. Bruce had never met Reese Jeffries, but he felt that he knew him intimately. He was the young activist poring over the Cambridge rent control ordinance while eating cold Chinese food, the pony-tailed heckler chanting “Slumlord” at Grandpa, the sanctimonious rent board member whose jaw had shattered beneath Bruce’s flying fist. Jeffries was all of those things, and Bruce—never having met him—hated him with a fiery passion. Bruce rubbed his eyes, tried to clear his head. Don’t jump to conclusions. This is too important. He re-read Jeffries’ arguments in opposition to Roberge’s request that the proceedings be kept confidential. The arguments were passionate, almost venomous. Why should Jeffries care so much? The chances of victory for Charese would be largely unaffected by the court’s decision on keeping the proceedings confidential. So why bother submitting a thirty-five page legal brief on the issue? Bruce knew the answer: For Jeffries, this case wasn’t about Charese at all. Rather, it was about an opportunity to deal a serious blow to one of Boston’s largest landlords and the man who posed a serious threat to the continued existence of rent control in the city. And Charese’s death had taken that opportunity away, since her case had died with her. So Jeffries’ button was obvious, bright red and smack in the middle of his forehead: Give him another shot at Krygier.