Hidden Charges

by Ridley Pearson

  “We just met,” he said.

  “It happens to the best of us.” Mykos Popolov smiled broadly, revealing his imperfect teeth.

  23

  During dinnertime at the Green, the concourses were nearly empty.

  Across from Haverill sat Forest Long, a limited partner in Haverill’s High Redevelopment Partners, and the managing trustee of the long-established New England Real Estate Investors, a real estate investment trust, which had loaned Haverill over $93 million and was also a joint venture partner in Yankee Green.

  Haverill laid down his fork and sipped from the crystal water glass, holding it by its stem. Ice tinkled against the sides.

  His daughter Julia had just excused herself from the table, and Marv noticed again how much she resembled Kate. He thought of the past. He did mind. They had been a family then. They had known joy, and even innocence. He knew little of that anymore. Work filled the void. Work took over. Even now at a gourmet dinner, work was the main course. Haverill lived for his work. With Kate gone off, what else was there?

  Julia would give them five to ten minutes to discuss their business matters. She would then reappear and wait on the edges for a signal from Marv to return to the table. Business as usual.

  Long sobered and lowered his voice. “Now what about this anchor? Can you get The Hauve?”

  “Peter’s been working on it. I’d say we’re fifty-fifty.”

  “Brad James pulls me aside after a meeting the other day and tells me he heard you had inquired about Alex Macdonald’s position on the Treemont building. Any truth to that?”

  Haverill stabbed a sliced carrot. “All we did was to look into whether or not Alex had the capital to finish his buying spree.” He could sense Long’s disapproval. “Listen, Forest, you know me well enough to know I would not break the law—”

  “Just stretch it,” Long interjected.

  “If Alex is low on funds then we have other options, do we not? You can hardly fault me for trying to see all sides of a situation.”

  “You’re one of Hillsdale’s good old boys, Marv. You point to a spot on the rug, someone cleans it up. You ask around in a certain tone if Alex Macdonald can get his hands on a loan, and some people will make damn sure he can’t.” He looked across at his friend. “You follow me?”

  “We need an anchor, Forest, immediately. Northern Lights screwed us. The media people will jump all over that empty space in the new pavilion. You know it as well as I. We’ve done everything but beg Mann to sign up with us. He knows our position. Christ, everybody knows about Northern Lights thanks to the Journal. Mann’s going to try and talk us down to next to nothing, which is where we were three weeks ago. I’m simply trying to enhance our position. Nothing illegal. I just want to see all the cards before I go making any bets.”

  “I know you’re in a rough position.”

  “Rough? I’m up the proverbial creek. If I get The Hauve and word gets out that I’ve given the space away, like what happened when we opened the sports pavilion, then I’ve got the Green Retailers’ Association screaming at me to play fair. They’ll all demand a reduction. They see the pattern developing. You know how it works. We practically give space away to our anchors and take a small percentage of net. At the same time, we sign the smaller shops to a stiff lease and take a good percentage of net. They’re organized now that they have this association. They’ll scream bloody hell if we end up rolling over for The Hauve.”

  “You’re saying it’s a no-win situation.”

  “I’m saying it’s damn tricky. If I have to involve Alex Macdonald, I will.” Haverill looked intensely into the man’s eyes.

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “It’s all aboveboard, my friend. If negotiations stall with Mann and The Hauve, which they already seem to have done, then hopefully I’m in a position to buy the building out from under them and send them packing.”

  “You can’t evict them.”

  “Everything but.”

  Long sighed, bringing the napkin to his lips. “I think I’ve heard enough.”

  “Fred Pinkham once told me that the bigger stick you swing, the less times you actually have to hit something with it. We’re just making sure we have a big enough stick.” Haverill shrugged indifferently. “You wouldn’t like retail, Forest. We need some stability. We need some stability soon. I’m protecting your interest as well as my own. Macdonald may come to you for the capital he lacks to finish off his plan. I just wanted you to be aware of our position. No reason to bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “Who knows about this?”

  “People look at Yankee Green, they see a success—as well they should. Growing pains is all it is. We’ll adjust. This new wing is just the ticket. It’ll pull us out of this slump.”

  “I mean about your intentions to buy the Treemont building. Who knows?”

  Haverill winced. “Nothing to worry about.” He sipped some water and spotted her. He scratched his ear and Julia moved toward the table. Long and Haverill stood as a waiter seated her. “What do you think, sweetheart? Are you ready for the grand opening?”

  She touched Forest Long’s hand gently. “Isn’t it exciting?”

  “Charm him to death, won’t you, sweetheart? I’ve just spotted someone I’ve got to speak with. Won’t be a minute. Excuse me, please.” He wanted to give Long a chance to think things over. He pushed his chair back with some difficulty and stood quickly. “Be right back,” he said.

  Julia turned to Long and said, “Now tell me all the juicy gossip of the inner circles of Boston’s big money world.” She pressed toward Long and laid her hand gently on the back of his wrist.

  For the moment, Forest Long was breathless.

  24

  At one o’clock in the morning, four security men, Susan, and Jacobs were still loading crates of fish onto the electric golf cart that served as an ambulance.

  “Only a couple of trips left,” said Susan enthusiastically. “How’s the refrigerator space holding up?”

  “We went right to the ceiling,” said the driver of the golf cart. “I think we’ll fit it all in, if we’re lucky.”

  Jacobs was already sore. He bent over and jerked another heavy crate up to a position where he could carry it. At the far end of the trailer he handed the crate to his guard, who handed it to Susan, who loaded it onto the cart. Jacobs took a long pause to admire her. She had the strength of a man and the self-discipline of a writer. She had not lost a bit of energy over the last three hours. She seemed to love to give orders, and people seemed to like taking them from her. It was her energy that made her so lively, and her quickness to joke that made the situation so bearable. What really surprised him at first was her willingness to tell lewd jokes. He supposed that after several years of pressrooms crowded with men, one grew accustomed to lewd jokes.

  It was one of the things he liked about her: She was feminine and masculine at the same time. This morning her curves had been mixed with a big orb of sweat at the breasts. Men sweat, women perspire. Baloney. She had been sweating. She was strong—able to handle the heavy boxes—and yet delicate. When Mykos had kissed her hand she had seemed positively regal. Radiant.

  He tried to stop thinking about her, but seeing her silhouette in the light thrown from the side of the pavilion didn’t help any. She worked with a permanent smile, eyes darting, ready with a joke if the troops appeared to be sagging.

  “Last crate,” Jacobs said, handing it out to her, a penetrating look in his eyes as he found hers. They both held the crate for a moment, and then he let go.

  His father had once told him that you could only judge a man’s character once you had worked with him. “Many men drink well together,” he had said. “Few men work well together. You will learn more about a man in ten minutes of working with him than in a week of drinking beer.” Women too, Jacobs was thinking.

  “Done,” Susan declared triumphantly, clapping her hands.

  Only just beginning, he felt like saying.

 
; Wednesday

  August 19

  1

  In the hard, early morning August sunlight, Marty Rappaport, bent at the waist and chewing on the butt of an unlit cigar, pulled a short piece of reinforcing bar from the chunk of broken concrete dislodged by the tractor trailer in the previous day’s accident. Behind him, an angry Carmine DeAngelo approached fast. Rappaport tugged hard, and as the bar came loose, he went over backwards. His fresh white shirt was smeared with two long streaks of dirt.

  “Who the hell are you, and what the hell are you doing here?” The inkwells beneath DeAngelo’s eyes gave him the mean look of a boxer.

  “I wanted to check out the rebar before I went jumping to any conclusions,” Rappaport explained.

  “Unless you got more reason than that, you’ll have to go. This area is still off limits. Insurance is supposed to take a look at it later on. Can’t touch a thing until they do.” DeAngelo bit down squarely on his own cigar, which, unlike Rappaport, he held clear back in his molars.

  “You’re the super on this job, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. Carmine DeAngelo.”

  “Marty Rappaport.” As the two shook hands Rappaport pulled himself to his feet. “I pushed some numbers around on this last night. I wanted a firsthand look at the rebar before I went shooting my mouth off. When you get to my age and start shooting your mouth off, people think you’re nothing but bad gas. How old are you, Mr. DeAngelo?”

  “Fifty-two.”

  “Well, you’ll know soon enough.”

  “What kind of numbers?”

  “Oh, just numbers,” Marty said cautiously. “Can I ask who oversaw this project from the mall’s end?”

  “General manager. Guy by the name of Peter Knorpp. He didn’t do squat on this job, though. You gotta gripe, you better settle with me.”

  “Who’s in charge of mall safety?”

  “Jacobs, Director of Security, as far as I know. What’s this all about?”

  “Met him yesterday. Can I ask you one other thing?”

  “What’s to stop you?”

  “Who’d you use for your concrete sub?”

  “Had two on this job. That’s when all our union problems began. With the first, I mean. We used DeGrassi’s outfit, Joey DeGrassi out of Dedham, for the first few pours, but his crews wouldn’t work the schedule we had mapped out. Not without a lot of overtime pay. DeGrassi claimed the overtime pay hadn’t been figured into the bid, which was a pile of crap, mind you, because we had the dates all spelled out real clear. At any rate, it kicked off our battle with Russo and the unions. Russo organized a picket line on the job and we hired scabs.”

  “I remember reading about it. It got kind of nasty, didn’t it?”

  “Always gets nasty with the union boys.”

  “You said two.”

  “Danny Romanello, from Milford, finished up the job.”

  “Who poured the stairway?”

  “That would been Romanello. What’s this all about anyway?”

  “I’m just a curious old fart, that’s all.”

  The two studied each other. “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Call me Marty.”

  “It’s a closed area, Marty.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay. I’m going.”

  As they ducked under the police tape, DeAngelo said, “If you got something to say about the construction, I’m the one to hear it.”

  “Nice meeting you, Mr. DeAngelo,” Rappaport said casually, raising his hand over his shoulder and heading toward Pavilion C.

  ***

  “How can I help you, Mr. Rappaport?” Jacobs sat behind a modest desk, the comfortable office’s large windows looking west toward Connecticut. Two padded chairs faced the desk, each angled slightly. Jacobs’s hat lay on the typewriter behind him.

  “Nice office.”

  “They treat us well here.”

  “I can see that. Nice carpet. I’ve got a brother-in-law in the carpet business. He’s got a good friend in the furniture business if you ever decide to do away with that rack of file cabinets and put in a sofa or a convertible. Jessi and I—that’s my wife—put one in our den, convertible, I mean. Just the thing for guests with kids. That extra space really pays off.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “You mind if I shut the door?” Rappaport stood up and closed the office door.

  Jacobs chewed away a grin. With the unlit cigar the little man reminded him of DeAngelo, but the bowlegged shuffle was all Rappaport’s. When Rappaport had returned to his seat, Jacobs looked the man in the eye and said, “Now, how can I help you?”

  “Mr. Jacobs, I’ve spent my life in engineering. Been around the construction business all my life. I study the way things are built, out of habit. I picture how they’d look on the plans, that sorta thing.” He lowered his voice. “When I saw that accident out by your new wing yesterday, something didn’t sit right. I couldn’t place it at first. You know how that goes, especially at my age.” Rappaport had a curious grin, both childish and wise. “Then I recalled a similar accident I’d seen on my Army base, God only knows how many years ago.” The same grin. “Couple of good old boys tied one on and ran a semi-truck smack into the armory. Busted the hell out of the truck. Barely scratched the armory. Armory was made of cement, just like your stairway. I got to thinking about the huge chunk of concrete that broke off. There was a good deal of crumbling as well—”

  “Are you talking about our stairwell now?”

  “That’s right. So I snuck a look at the manifest and got the overall tonnage of the loaded vehicle. I plugged some numbers into the equation accounting for the stress tolerance of the cement in your stairway. I did it twice, once for a twenty-seven-day-old pour, in case that stairway was added as an afterthought, and once for a ninety-day-old pour—”

  “Stairway was poured right along with everything else, as far as I know.”

  “Yeah, I figured that, by the look of it. I was just down there a few minutes ago. It looks to me like they planned on precast for most of the walls and filled in by pouring some of the support structure and your staircases.”

  “You’re out of my league. Carmine DeAngelo would know more about that.”

  “I couldn’t talk to DeAngelo about this. Wasn’t even sure if I should talk to you. But he tells me a man name Knorpp oversaw the construction, and that, I figure, leaves you in the clear.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Mr. Rappaport.”

  That same grin. “Son, if the concrete was up to strength, that truck would have had to be going seventy-eight point five miles an hour to do the damage it did.” He let the comment sit there. “Checked my figures five times. Got the same thing each time.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “As far as I can tell, someone started your pours with an inferior cement. Part, maybe all, of your new wing is below code.”

  Jacobs ran his hand through his hair and looked at the man’s face. “That’s impossible.”

  “Happens all the time. More often than you might think.”

  “Below code?”

  “When a job is poured, the concrete sub pours a number of cylinders at the same time. A testing lab breaks those cylinders at certain time intervals to check the stress tolerance of the pour. The lab can tell how well the cement is curing according to how much pressure is required to crush each cylinder.

  “There are a few ways a guy can get around the testing laboratory: One, the sub pours his cylinders from different cement and submits those cylinders to be tested. When they’re checked, everything comes out fine. Two, the sub simply substitutes cylinders from a different job for the ones he claims are off of this job. Lab checks them out: no problems. Three, the sub has someone in the lab on his payroll. All three get the job done. All roads lead to Rome.” That same smile.

  “Is there any possibility of a mistake?”

  “I wouldn’t take my word for it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What wou
ld you do?”

  “If I were you, I’d lift two samples from that accident and very quietly submit them to two different testing laboratories, maybe one in Connecticut. Someplace away from here. I wouldn’t tell them where they came from—which is to say, if they ask, I’d lie. Many of the labs, at one time or another, have been accused or convicted of this same offense. They tend to protect each other. What you do is tell them it’s from a precast bridge on a piece of property you’re thinking of buying. I checked the books, and the stress tolerance required for a one-lane preformed bridge is just about identical to that of a commercial property the size of your new wing. Quite frankly, your cement should be as strong as anything that’s poured these days. Using prestressed forms for your walls puts all the weight-bearing on your pours. As I understand it, there’re eight major weight-bearing columns in your new wing. DeAngelo tells me that everything from your subfloor up was poured by the same sub. That includes the stairway that fell apart. If any of your support columns were poured outta the same crap that stairway was, you got problems. Capital P.”

  “You talked to DeAngelo about this?”

  “No. I brought it to you first. No telling who’s involved.”

  “I appreciate your concern. What I’d like you to do is put all your numbers into a letter, including an explanation of your concerns. Make a copy of the letter and leave it someplace safe. I’d like a copy as well. Include mention of this meeting, so we’re both covered there.”

  “You look a little white, Mr. Jacobs.”

  “Toby,” he corrected. “I don’t doubt it. That new wing cost a hundred and eighty million dollars. What you’re saying could have far-reaching effects.”

  “Indeed it could.”

  “I’d like you to get those samples for me, if you don’t mind. I don’t know what to look for, and it might tip someone off if I suddenly take an interest in the construction. You, on the other hand, would just look like a souvenir taker.”

  “I understand completely.” Rappaport was doing a fair job at concealing his enthusiasm.