Hidden Charges

by Ridley Pearson

  The angry pulsing of the fire alarm drove him on.

  The final details of the pavilion’s construction were being attended to. On Saturday, ribbon-cutting ceremonies would open this latest amusement wing to an expected crowd of five thousand. The Giant’s Tail, the world’s largest indoor roller coaster, loomed before him. A twelve-foot-diameter solar-powered clock dominated the far wall, a black rack of photovoltaic cells to its left, fed by sunlight through the pavilion’s glass canopy.

  Today, FunWorld’s concourses were nearly empty as a few dozen workers scurried about, dressing up the storefronts, working on electrical fixtures, planting foliage, and installing awnings. Several retailers were busy inside the stores as well, though clearly in the way of the workers.

  Jacobs broke into a run.

  The monotone beeping in his ear caught his attention. Its pitch clashed with that of the alarm, causing an ugly dissonance.

  “The fire is down in Utility Room Five on Sub-level Two,” Brock informed him. Jacobs opened the door to the emergency stairway and leaped two steps at a time. The alarm stopped.

  He turned left, the bitter smell of fire enveloping him and raising the hairs on the nape of his neck. His heart banged in his chest. He threaded his way through onlookers, sensing the death before he saw it. A chilling silence hung over the normally boisterous construction workers. He stopped, panting, facing a bloodstained T-shirt that covered McClatchy’s crushed head and chest. Inside Room 5, the blackened, smoking remains of what had been a locker room. Several workers finished emptying fire extinguishers on the debris.

  “What the hell happened here?” Jacobs inquired of the bare-chested worker to his right.

  “Who knows? Whatever it was, it blew McClatchy here to high heaven. I covered what remains of his head with my shirt. His brains is all over the place. Never seen nothing like it.”

  “Touch anything?”

  “No. The boys have been real careful.”

  “Seen DeAngelo?”

  “I hear he’s on his way down.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you stick around. See if you can’t get somebody to break up the show. We don’t need a lot of spectators. And why don’t we hold any discussion of this down to a minimum until we know exactly what happened.”

  Jacobs stared at the charred contents of the room as the worker hollered to the men to get back to work and keep their mouths shut until they knew what they were talking about. The hallway emptied quickly.

  Jacobs called Dispatch on his radio. “You better notify downtown. This is one for their people.”

  “What happened down there?” Dicky Brock’s voice was anxious.

  “Explosion of some sort. We lost a man.” Toby walked down the drab hall, stooping to stab the errant wedding ring with a pen. He held the ring at arm’s length, a glint of fluorescent light sparkling off the edge. “You better notify homicide.”

  4

  Hank Stevens had a delivery to make at the mall. Because of an unexpected, ferocious summer rainstorm in the Atlantic, off the Jersey coast, the driver of the heavily laden Peterbilt had had too little sleep. At five this morning—six hours late—he had made his first deliveries in New Haven. At seven, he had dropped sixteen cases of cod on the outskirts of Providence.

  He had yet to eat breakfast and his stomach continually reminded him of that fact, pained by too many coffees and a sticky Milky Way chocolate bar. He kept his hands from shaking by gripping the wheel tightly. He wanted some sleep and a square meal, knowing full well that he still had dozens of deliveries to make in the Boston area, as far north as Marblehead, before this long day would be over. All because of a goddamned New Bedford fishermen’s strike.

  He steered the rig left at the light and followed a long line of cars into a four-lane access road. He’d heard about this mall, seen pictures of it on the tube, but he’d never been here before.

  At its north end was the covered sports stadium. The Boston Patriots had moved here from Foxboro last season, in a deal worked out by the Sullivan brothers. But the stadium was just the beginning. Stevens could see another four structures—damn near as large as the stadium—each connected to the next, all with glass canopies bubbled out of their centers. It looked like a NASA drawing of a space colony.

  Thousands of cars were parked in the carefully labeled parking lots. An open vehicle, constructed to look like a San Francisco cable car, turned in front of his rig, ferrying customers from the outlying parking lots to the mall. A sign on its side read: TO PAVILION C. It was packed with women and kids. Stevens couldn’t help but notice the number in back. She was built like a centerfold, her thin T-shirt sawed off above the navel. A bright red impression of a kiss hung between her breasts. He couldn’t take his eyes off them. Jesus.

  She ran some deep red lipstick around her open mouth and checked herself out in a tiny mirror she fished from her purse.

  He followed the trolley. His first delivery listed on the manifest was for a restaurant, the Fish House, in Pavilion C. He figured the trolley would lead him there.

  He wanted to reach out and touch her. Firm little buttons, hardened from rubbing against the soft fabric.

  Suddenly, without signaling, the trolley made a sharp right into the semi-darkness of the pavilion’s underground parking facility. Stevens didn’t react quickly enough. The cab’s front rubber caught the curb. He jerked the wheel sharply to the left in order to avoid construction scaffolding, but, before his right foot reached the brake pedal, the front of the Peterbilt struck the vertical steel posts that supported the underside of a large cement stairway. The posts fell away like matchsticks. As the front bumper slammed into the concrete stairway, he heard the refrigeration unit connect with the overhead landing.

  A large chunk of cement was crushed to dust by the rig’s bumper. More cement, from overhead, spilled down the windshield and onto the shiny hood.

  It was over in a matter of seconds.

  5

  Marty and Jessica Rappaport started out from their condominium on the north side of the city of Hillsdale. They were late. Marty drove the yellow midsize Cadillac that he had bought equipped with electric everything. Jessi had blue-white hair held in a pink scarf. Her fingers wormed inside a tissue as she checked her seat belt for the third time.

  “I get the message, honey,” Marty drawled. “There’s no need to tug on it every time you think I’m driving too fast. You can just tell me.” Marty had grown up in a Jewish neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side, though he spoke without a New York accent. Many of the local residents of Pawtucket, outside of Providence, had a stronger “New York” accent than New Yorkers.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you,” she quipped. “You’re driving too fast.”

  He slowed down.

  Even so, she tugged on her seat belt. As a young girl of seventeen, madly in love with the stout and handsome Martin Rappaport, she had ignored her mother’s warnings that marrying a Jewish man would make for a difficult life. Difficult in some ways, perhaps. But she had no regrets. Martin Rappaport was about as special as they come. Odd in his own way. Rebellious, even in his late sixties. But there was no other Marty.

  Marty eased back on the pedal without argument. Jessi had wanted to sell the Caddy, but he wouldn’t ride the city bus no matter what. Going to the shopping center was about all they used the car for anymore, what with everything the mall offered, but she could not persuade Marty Rappaport to ride the bus. He thought that riding the bus was for the really old, and the really poor, and he didn’t think of himself as either of those.

  “You’re never going to be elected president of the Greyhounds if we’re always late,” she reminded. “We should get an earlier start.”

  “If I could control the timing of my bowel movement, I would, sweetheart. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Less coffee, I think.”

  She’d been envious of his ability to still drink coffee ever since the doctor had ordered her off it. It was a sensitive subject, one Marty chose to avoid.
“Look at that lamppost there. That thing’s going to fall over one of these days and kill somebody.”

  “Everything is unsafe to you. Ever since that trip to Mexico you think you’re the expert on everything. Why you had to go to Mexico I’ll never know.”

  “Because our government asked me, that’s why.”

  “They asked you because one of your brothers arranged it.”

  “Ahh…”

  “Stay in your lane.”

  “The lanes are too narrow. They should have made them wider and painted them better.”

  “There you go again.”

  “That’s not complaining.”

  She reached out and touched his arm. “Sorry, honey. I just don’t like being late.”

  “I know. I understand.”

  He reached over. They held hands. Marty smiled and sighed. “Love you, sweet thing.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Jessi looked at him. His face was age-stained, his lips a pale white. Since the firm had requested his retirement ten months ago, her Martin had not slept well, did not eat well, and had signs of prostate trouble. His problem was that he couldn’t face retirement; he couldn’t face the long, empty days and he hadn’t found much to replace them with.

  In the last few months he had somehow convinced himself that to remain active was to find fault in anything and everything ever built, that remaining active kept one young. She knew only too well that nothing would ever change him. Thank the Lord. She loved him just the way he was—irreverent, strong, loud. Even abrasive. Martin Rappaport knew what was what, and he wasn’t afraid to say so.

  She had grown comfortable living with him, like learning to sleep with the sound of loud traffic outside your window.

  He had always been like this: wound up tight, fully coiled, filled with a straining nervous energy that attempted to escape through a tapping foot, a scratching hand, or running-on of the mouth. His mouth had gotten him in trouble too many times to count. Early on she had tried to point this out to him, but what was the point of trying to change another person? He was an alarmist, plain and simple, and the older he grew the worse he got, now complaining about anything that caught his eye, as if by identifying any fault at all it reinforced his own existence.

  There was more than a bit of jealousy in Martin. The youngest of three sons, his oldest brother had inherited the family business, a tray manufacturing company established in the Bronx at the turn of the century. The middle brother, Abraham, became an influential Washington attorney, after handling the family company’s expansion. Too young for the big war, Martin had enlisted in the Army and become part of the Army Corps of Engineers just before the Korean conflict. From then on his life had been numbers and drafting, stress ratios and slide rules.

  Jessi had met him at a USO dance in Wells, Nevada, four days before he had shipped out: a strong, handsome man who drank well and knew all the best jokes. For three days they had enjoyed a passionate romance that culminated with champagne in bed and the loss of her maidenhood. Off he had gone to war. Three months later she had miscarried, and complications left her unable to bear children.

  Martin joined an engineering firm in Dover, Massachusetts. His promotions went slowly (they both agreed this was due to his heritage), to unimportant positions in unimportant divisions. In all, he had spent the last thirty-four years in six firms. He remained envious of his older brother’s control of the family company and the large growth the business experienced under his direction. Martin received a small check from his father’s trust each month; his brothers elected to reinvest their cash into company shares. Martin had missed much of his brothers’ financial success due his own failure to reinvest.

  Now it was the two of them and the Greyhounds. Nearly every day was spent at Yankee Green.

  “This is the short cut I was telling you about.” He swung left and down a residential road, the houses identical boxes with identical roofs. “You don’t get caught up in all the arriving traffic. So much more traffic these days.”

  She looked over and studied his hawk-nosed profile.

  He angled his way through a grid of back streets, finally pulling to a stop sign. Ahead of them was the south side of the sprawling mall.

  Ever since Jessi’s triple bypass they had used the Green for morning walks. Doctor’s orders. Stay out of the heat. Stay out of the cold. The Green’s controlled air system was the perfect answer.

  So it was that each and every morning at this hour Jessica and Martin Rappaport entered through the doors of Yankee Green, running shoes bound tightly to their feet, shoulders square, a youthful lilt to their stride, heads held high. Marty wore his usual white ever-press shirt, Jessica her pink scarf and khaki walking outfit: an anonymous elderly couple in a sea of stiff-legged septuagenarians.

  “Look at that, Jessi!” he exclaimed, pointing to the truck wedged beneath the stairway.

  “First we walk, dear. First we walk.” She knew he’d be over there within the hour.

  6

  Detective Doug Shleit stood behind a pair of dirty glasses that dominated his hard face. He was as tall as Jacobs, and his broad shoulders had the same look of being carved from oak. His forehead reminded Jacobs of a sheer granite cliff rising to a short-cut field of corn-stubble auburn hair. His voice had the sound of a two-packs-a-day smoker and came through lips that barely moved, like those of a character in a low-budget Saturday morning cartoon. He had all the animation of a chiseled stone statue. He walked as if nursing a bad case of hemorrhoids. His suit was wrinkled, the jacket missing a button. He had the deliberately unkempt appearance of a longtime bachelor.

  “Jesus,” he said, standing at the door to the utility room, Jacobs to his right, “even blew a chunk out of the wall.” McClatchy’s body had been taken away only moments earlier. Other than the coroner, Shleit had been the only one to lift the T-shirt and look at the man’s crushed head.

  “No threatening calls, nothing like that?” Shleit asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  Shleit turned to one of his men. “Can we go in there?”

  The man nodded. “Long as you don’t disturb nothing, Lieutenant.”

  “Right,” he replied, stepping into the room. “Wanna look at this?” he asked Jacobs, who followed him inside.

  The room smelled strangely bitter, confirming that the explosion had been the result of a bomb, not gas. A tremendous hole in the middle of the lockers showed the concrete of the wall. “Any way to tell whose locker was in the middle?”

  “Already checked. It was DeAngelo’s. He’s the general contractor’s supervisor.”

  “Runs the show?”

  “Essentially. The contractor spends most of his time split between four or five jobs. DeAngelo keeps this one running.”

  “I think I’d like to speak with him.”

  “One thing doesn’t track.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If someone was after DeAngelo they’d blow the trailer outside. He practically lives in that trailer.”

  “But his locker was in the middle?” Shleit asked, stepping forward. “No question that bomb was in the middle locker, is there?”

  “Looks that way to me.”

  “Harvey!” the detective shouted into the hallway. “How much explosive we talking about?”

  “To do that kind of damage to the wall, I’d say four ounces of plastique or two to three sticks of dynamite. Know more soon. Could have been worse.”

  “So maybe it was just a warning,” said Shleit, fishing for a comment from Jacobs, who had knelt to examine a piece of stretched, scorched metal from the lockers.

  “Could be.”

  “Any guesses who would want to scare the shit out of this DeAngelo?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that—not necessarily DeAngelo, but who might want to do this.”

  “And?”

  “Unfortunately, it’s a rather long list.”

  The two men looked at each other. There was a heavy sile
nce in the room. The hallway had emptied of all but a few police who stood around talking. “I’m listening.”

  “You’ll want to check DeAngelo as well.”

  “Don’t tell me my job, Jacobs. Tell me your long list.”

  The lack of light in the room and the blackness from the explosion gave Toby the feeling of standing in a cave. “How about in my office?”

  “How about in DeAngelo’s trailer?”

  On the way to the trailer, which was kept on the south side of the new pavilion, Toby received word of the truck accident. He told Brock to inform Traffic Control to reroute cars entering at entrance six.

  “What’s up?” Shleit asked, waddling along uncomfortably.

  “Tractor trailer jumped the curb and struck one of our new stairways.”

  “Not your day.”

  “Not that unusual. We get our share of work out here.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “I came on a little over five years ago. Been Director for a little over two.”

  “You like it?”

  “Has its ups and downs. I came out of repo. It’s better than repo.”

  “Anything’s better than repo,” Shleit said, smiling as he opened the door to the white trailer.

  Jacobs smiled back.

  DeAngelo was on the telephone, pushed into a corner behind a small desk littered with paper. He had a hook nose and half-filled inkwells beneath his eyes. He held the phone pinched against his stubby chin and waved the men inside, pointing to two chairs that were covered with construction plans.

  Shleit moved the plans carelessly to the floor. Jacobs rolled up the set on his chair and placed them on the desk.

  DeAngelo ended his conversation, hung up the phone, and greeted Shleit after Jacobs introduced the detective. “Making arrangements for McClatchy’s insurance. Goddamned companies love to cover you until they gotta pay up.”