“How about my boy Richie? Will he have a chance against either of them in the general election?”
“Cardella’s no slouch,” Jenna responded immediately. “He had four good years as AG. He’s handsome, he’s been a successful lawyer and he’ll have Sacco’s republican coattails to hang onto. That’s assuming he wins the primary.”
Reardon looked somewhat startled. “It’s hard to lose when you’re the only one on the ballot,” he said. “Or are you trying to tell me something?”
“Don’t bet the family jewels, Terry, but if my gut and intuition are as good as they’ve always been, we’re going to see some competition for Cardella pretty soon. I’ve asked a lot of people if they expect someone else to get in the race. Too many of their answers are like, ‘It’s still early,’ or ‘You never can tell.’ I’m hearing that from powerful people in the State. By now, they should be able to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ definitely. It’s almost like there’s a conspiracy out there to spring a surprise at the last minute. I’m just about ready to offer McMurphy the usual two to one odds.”
The waitress came over to take their orders.
“Hiya, Pauline,” Terry greeted her. “Any chance of getting tomorrow night’s special tonight?” he asked.
“You sure are lucky, Mr. Reardon,” she answered. “They moved it up a day.”
“Great. What is it?”
“The same as last week.”
“Sounds good. I’ll take it.”
“I’m sorry. We just sold the last one.”
Reardon burst out laughing. “That was beautiful, Pauline. We ought to put together a routine. We’ll be the next Abbott and Costello.”
Pauline grinned broadly, revealing several missing teeth. She was about fifteen years older than him. “You’re a devil, Mr. Reardon.”
Jenna listened to their fast paced repartee in amazement. She smiled for a few seconds and then looked serious. “If that’s gone, is it a good time to order the Wednesday night special?” she asked.
Pauline winked at Terry. “I like your daughter,” she said.
He laughed first, followed by Jenna. Pauline waited a few seconds before joining in.
40
DOUG FIORE’S WORKING LUNCH with the Executive Committee on his first day back in the office lasted until after 2:30 p.m. As soon as it concluded, and while Rosa Santos was still clearing off the conference table, he told Dana Briggs to call George Ryder.
“Tell him to come to my office for a meeting. He’ll know what it’s about,” he said.
Dana buzzed him a few minutes later. She reported that Ryder took some personal time off for the afternoon.
That’s why I hate this guy, Fiore thought. He knew I’d be back today and I’d want to see him, but he’s going to do things his way. A moment passed. “Okay, tell his secretary to bring me a copy of the notes from his negotiations last Thursday and Friday at Ocean State Wire & Cable.”
Briggs was back to him again quickly, opening his office door this time. “Myra says he didn’t give her any notes to type yet.”
“Okay, leave him a message to see me as soon as he gets here tomorrow.” Dana started to leave. “And tell Paul Castillo to come in.” Fiore was upset at the contempt Ryder was showing him, but it had a good side to it. The fat bastard is killing himself, he thought. He’s making it easier on me all the time to show him the door.
Fiore thought about phoning Carol Singer while he was waiting, but decided that he didn’t want to see her after work. His penis suddenly went limp as he started making love to Grace on Saturday night, and they had to forget about it when he couldn’t recover. He tried again on Sunday, but was unable to induce an erection after they got into bed and lay there for a while. He hoped to get hard by picturing Marilyn Monroe sitting on top of him, high enough that he could watch his penis enter and leave her time after time. It did no good, and he said nothing to Grace about the problem. She was unaware of his efforts and afraid to bring up the subject. After a while she turned away from him with a quiet “Good night.”
Fiore assumed that the impotence was a sign of his growing anxiety about what the coming week would bring, the spotlight he would suddenly find himself in. It never occurred to him that his sex drive might be affected this way. He decided to watch some TV with Grace that night, go to bed early and try again. But if it wasn’t going to happen, he didn’t want to embarrass himself with Carol. There was no sense talking to her, he figured, if they weren’t going to sleep together. He’d wait until he was over the problem.
His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door, and Paul Castillo entered.
“Hello, Paul. This will only take a minute.” Fiore turned his chair halfway around to the credenza behind him and picked up his briefcase from the floor. He took out a thick file, turned back and handed it to Castillo. “Do me a favor, Paul. This has to do with Ocean State Wire & Cable, a good client of ours. Most of the papers in here are copies of stuff that Ryder has in the main file. Read over everything tonight and let’s talk about it tomorrow. I may need your help. What time do you get in?”
“What time do you want me?” Castillo asked. His tone sent a clear message that anytime would be all right.
“Is 7:30 too early?”
“No sweat. I’ll stop for coffee. Do you want one?”
“Yeah, a large black with one sugar.” Fiore got up to walk him to the door. “I really appreciate this. By the way,” he inquired, resting his hand on Castillo’s shoulder, “have you been giving George any of your own cases?”
Castillo was again anxious to show he was a team player, ready to do whatever the managing partner asked of him. “Whatever I could, Doug, within the guidelines you gave me. Nothing big and no work for a major client. Different small stuff.”
“Good,” Fiore said. “I knew I could count on you.” They reached the door. He turned toward Castillo and looked directly at him. “But as of right now, I want you to stop feeding him anything.” It was a decision he had reached just before Castillo entered his office, and now he felt he had to support it in some way. “For all we know,” he said, pointing a finger in Castillo’s direction, “George may be looking to move to another firm. He doesn’t seem to be too happy here anymore, and I think he may be losing control of the negotiations in this Ocean State case. If he does want to go somewhere else, we sure as hell don’t want him taking any of our work with him.”
“No sweat. What do I say if he asks me for something?”
“Just tell him things have slowed down and you’ve got everything under control,” Fiore answered. It suddenly occurred to him that Ryder would be able to track Castillo’s hours on the weekly computer printouts. “Don’t show more than thirty-two hours a week of billables. If that puts you in a bind at any time, let me know right away. I’ll find an associate who can give you whatever help you need without Ryder knowing about it. And I’ll keep track of all the hours you could have done the work yourself.”
41
“DANA, TELL FRANKIE I’M ready to look at the numbers.” Fiore called out the instructions to his secretary through his open office door as he headed for the conference room. Scardino joined him there a few minutes later, wearing his usual silly grin. Early on, Fiore used to think that Scardino was ready to tell a funny story that brought a premature smile to his face. After a while he learned that it was the look Frankie carried around most of the day.
“The financials will take us a couple of hours,” Scardino said. “Can we talk about something else first?”
“Go ahead.” Fiore sat back in his chair. He figured it would involve Frankie’s private life in some way.
“Doug, we’ve got to do something about Helen Barone.” The words came out almost in a whine.
He immediately sensed what Scardino had in mind. “What’s the problem?” he asked. His tone implied that it was difficult for him to believe Barone could be the source of any concern.
Scardino picked up on the inflection in Fiore’s voice and re
alized he might have a difficult selling job. He decided to inject more emotion into his answer. “The problem is that she’s always ready to give me a hard time. She resents my keeping after her to make sure she’s doing the job right. I guess I must be the first person who ever checked up on her—you know, ask around to see if the lawyers and secretaries are happy with the way she runs things, how she treats everyone.
“When I get complaints, I speak to Helen about how to correct things or do them differently. The trouble is that she doesn’t want to hear it from me. She thinks she’s doing a perfect job. And I’ll tell you something, Doug, it’s even worse when you’re away. Like it was the past two weeks. She figures the managing partner is the only one who can tell her what to do. She just ignores anything I say. How am I supposed to do my job that way?”
Fiore didn’t respond immediately. He stared at Scardino during the pause, then leaned back in his chair when he spoke. “Frankie, do you know how long Helen’s been here?” He dragged out the word “long.”
“Twenty-three years,” Scardino replied. “I checked it out in case you asked.”
“That’s right. And how do you think it would look if we just let her go?”
“We don’t have to fire her.”
“What then?”
“Put someone in over her with a new title, like ‘Senior Administrator.’ Let Helen report to her.”
“She’d never accept that, Frankie,” Fiore said. “It would be too embarrassing after all that time. She’d quit first.”
Scardino was ready for that one also. “If she quits, that’s her decision,” he answered, as if rendering a solemn judgment. “We’re only doing what’s best for the office.”
Fiore decided to play the game with Scardino a little longer. “Besides, it would cost us money to go to a headhunter and find someone new to bring in,” he offered.
“No, it wouldn’t, Doug. We could promote from within.”
He kept it going. “How can we do that, Frankie? We don’t have an assistant office manager now. We never needed one with the way Helen handled things.”
“You’re right. I know that. But we’ve got one or two people who could step right in and do the job.”
“Who do you have in mind?” Fiore asked. He knew for sure who one of the two would be.
“I think Janice Rossman would be good,” Scardino said. “She’s been doing a fantastic job supervising the mail room. Things have improved a hundred percent down there since we moved her into that slot.”
Fiore smiled to himself, recalling his being informed by Dana Briggs earlier that morning that Manny Puleo gave the firm his two weeks’ notice the previous Friday afternoon. He had worked in the mail room for almost three years and everyone complimented him on the job he did. He didn’t just walk, he danced through his chores there every day to the rhythm of whatever Latin song was playing on his stereo. But Puleo told Dana that too many things in the mail room changed after Rossman was put in charge.
“He spoke to me because Helen left early on Friday for a dental appointment,” Dana told Fiore. “He said it’s not a fun place any more, that Rossman doesn’t know how to treat people. He told me she always blames someone else for anything she messes up herself. Manny expects that a couple of the others will quit too,” Dana reported.
As he thought more about what Dana told him, Fiore began to get angry. Frankie must think I don’t know what’s going on around here, he said to himself. I don’t like his trying to bullshit me like this. Maybe it’s time for me to tell him that Rossman’s gone as far as she’s going to go. He decided to hear the rest of what Scardino had to say.
“Who else could you recommend?” he asked.
The question caught Scardino off guard. He didn’t have another candidate for the position because the whole idea was to put Rossman in a situation where she could make more money and keep her dependent on him. He stared at Fiore blankly for several seconds before getting a sudden inspiration.
“I think Dana could handle it, but I know you’d hate to lose her.”
Fiore didn’t confirm that supposition. “Janice or Dana, huh? Let me think about it. Maybe I ought to speak to Helen first and see if I can straighten her out.”
“I really think it’s too late for that,” Scardino said quickly. “She’ll know I spoke to you and resent me for it. Then she’ll always be looking for a way to undermine me.”
Fiore was impressed with the answer. Frankie’s put some time into this, he thought. He really wants it bad. Doug had already considered the various things he would be asking Scardino to do for him in the months ahead when he’d be spending so much time out of the office. He knew he’d have to step down as managing partner temporarily once the campaigning began. It was important to have someone like Frankie around to watch everything that was going on and report to him on a regular basis. He realized that Frankie would be aware of things that might never catch Dana’s attention. If he wasn’t going to be the next governor, Fiore wanted to be sure that no palace revolts were taking place in his absence, and that the power he now had would still be there when he returned to practice law. If all it took to guarantee Scardino’s loyalty to him was a decision making it easier for his comptroller to keep getting a piece of ass in the office, it was a cheap price to pay. When he was through campaigning, he could move Rossman to some other job, or even terminate her if she wasn’t performing well as office manager. And he would do his best to convince Helen Barone to take another position, with the same pay. In fact, he might be able to create something new for her, something she’d be happy doing. It could work out well for everyone, he thought.
“You’re probably right,” he said, lifting Scardino’s spirits instantly. “I’ll think about it. Okay, let’s get off that and see if we’re making any money around here.”
As Fiore turned to the spreadsheets placed in front of him, he was sure that Frankie’s shit-eating grin had gotten even bigger. There was a strong temptation for him to say that maybe Dana would be great for that job. But for the sake of getting through the work in front of them, he resisted it.
42
WHEN HE THOUGHT ABOUT it afterwards, George Ryder realized that he was ill prepared for the meeting. He was remiss in not suspecting what Doug Fiore would say and do. But if he was ever to learn all the facts he was unaware of that day, he’d understand that there was nothing he could have done to change things.
Ryder was barely seated in the chair across from Fiore’s desk on Tuesday morning when Doug began to show his outrage. “I thought we had an understanding that you’d have a copy of the Ocean State Wire negotiating notes and the latest proposals on my desk the day after you met with them. There was nothing here yesterday from either your last Thursday or Friday sessions. Your secretary told Dana you didn’t give her any notes to type.”
Ryder reached for the folder he set down moments earlier next to his chair and began opening it. “I didn’t give Myra anything because I wanted to type them up myself at home on Friday night while everything was still fresh in my mind.” He pulled several papers from the file and put them on the desk when Fiore didn’t reach out to take them.
Ryder continued. “I came by here yesterday morning at about 9:15 to give them to you and explain a few things in the notes I hadn’t spelled out in detail. Dana said you’d be in meetings most of the day. I figured you probably wouldn’t have time to read them anyway, and that you might get concerned about what’s in there if I didn’t clear up a few things for you ahead of time.”
Fiore was trying to keep his displeasure under control. He didn’t comment on what Ryder said. The answer took some of the wind out of his sails. “Are you any closer to a settlement than you were the last time we spoke?” he asked.
“We’ve gotten a number of things off the table,” Ryder answered.
“Do you mean the small stuff, the language changes, sick leave, those kinds of things?”
“That’s right. It all takes time, Doug. I thought getting thos
e items out of the way on Friday might help break the logjam on the big issues when we get back together again.”
“Are you and the Union any closer on wages?”
“No, there was no movement there.” Ryder bit his lip slightly and shook his head back and forth.
“What’s the Company’s last proposal on wages?” Fiore skipped through the notes as he asked questions.
“A freeze for the first two years and a one percent increase in the third.”
“Isn’t that the same thing it was two weeks ago?”
“That’s right,” Ryder said. “Hanley doesn’t want to move yet. He’s convinced the Company needs a two-year freeze. I think the Platts may have told him last week that they don’t want a strike on that issue because he gave me the OK to figure out the cost for small raises in the second and third years. But I’m not sure because he never mentioned having talked to either one of them. He may just be buying time before the contract runs out, hoping he can somehow persuade the Union to go along with what he’s looking for.”
Fiore turned his chair so that it was facing a side wall and continued reading the notes. Ryder started looking inside the bulky file folder for his own copy. Doug spoke without looking over toward him.
“At the Thursday meeting—the one the week before last—the Union lowered its demands in half, for the second and third years, from a buck more an hour down to half a buck, right?”
“That’s right.”
“And you guys stood pat.”
“Right.”
“Then this past Thursday they moved again, cutting the increase to a quarter an hour.”
“Yes. On Thursday morning.”
“And after that you gave them the same two-year freeze proposal all over again?”
“On wages, yes, but we changed it slightly on medical.”
“Goddammit,” Fiore hissed, ignoring the last comment. He returned to the notes. Ryder began reviewing his copy also. Suddenly, Fiore was out of his chair and standing by the door to the conference room. The anger about to be unleashed was foreshadowed by the rapid flush appearing on his face. Fiore had already concluded that it was too late to give Ryder the settlement guidelines he received from Sandy Tarantino. He thought that since Ryder wasn’t certain whether the Platts had communicated any instructions to Hanley on what they wanted to see in a new contract, Ryder might figure that Fiore was calling the shots. He might also conclude, as Fiore was aware he had during the negotiations three years earlier, that Doug was ready to force a settlement favorable to the Union in order not to risk losing the client through a work stoppage regardless of what Hanley thought he had to have in the contract. It was better, Fiore decided, to handle the situation in a way that wouldn’t prompt Ryder to have those thoughts.
My Honorable Brother Page 24
